The Touchstone...................................................................................................................................................1

Edith Wharton ..........................................................................................................................................1

Professor Joslin, who, as our readers are doubtless aware, is engaged in writing the life of Mrs. Aubyn, asks

us to state that he will be greatly indebted to any of the famous novelist's friends who will furnish him with

information concerning the period previous to her coming to England. Mrs. Aubyn had so few intimate

friends, and consequently so few regular correspondents, that letters will be of special value. Professor

Joslin's address is 10 Augusta Gardens, Kensington, and he begs us to say that he will promptly return any

Glennard dropped the Spectator and sat looking into the fire. The club was filling up, but he still had to

himself the small inner room, with its darkening outlook down the rainstreaked prospect of Fifth Avenue. It

was all dull and dismal enough, yet a moment earlier his boredom had been perversely tinged by a sense of

resentment at the thought that, as things were going, he might in time have to surrender even the despised

privilege of boring himself within those particular four walls. It was not that he cared much for the club, but

that the remote contingency of having to give it up stood to him, just then, perhaps by very reason of its

insignificance and remoteness, for the symbol of his increasing abnegations; of that perpetual paringoff that

was gradually reducing existence to the naked business of keeping himself alive. It was the futility of his

multiplied shifts and privations that made them seem unworthy of a high attitude; the sense that, however

rapidly he eliminated the superfluous, his cleared horizon was likely to offer no nearer view of the one

prospect toward which he strained. To give up things in order to marry the woman one loves is easier than to

Through the open door he saw young Hollingsworth rise with a yawn from the ineffectual solace of a

brandyandsoda and transport his purposeless person to the window. Glennard measured his course with a

contemptuous eye. It was so like Hollingsworth to get up and look out of the window just as it was growing

too dark to see anything! There was a man rich enough to do what he pleasedhad he been capable of being

pleasedyet barred from all conceivable achievement by his own impervious dulness; while, a few feet off,

Glennard, who wanted only enough to keep a decent coat on his back and a roof over the head of the woman

he loved, Glennard, who had sweated, toiled, denied himself for the scant measure of opportunity that his zeal

would have converted into a kingdomsat wretchedly calculating that, even when he had resigned from the

club, and knocked off his cigars, and given up his Sundays out of town, he would still be no nearer

The Spectator had slipped to his feet and as he picked it up his eye fell again on the paragraph addressed to

the friends of Mrs. Aubyn. He had read it for the first time with a scarcely perceptible quickening of

attention: her name had so long been public property that his eye passed it unseeingly, as the crowd in the

"Information concerning the period previous to her coming to England. . . ." The words were an evocation.

He saw her again as she had looked at their first meeting, the poor woman of genius with her long pale face

and shortsighted eyes, softened a little by the grace of youth and inexperience, but so incapable even then of

any hold upon the pulses. When she spoke, indeed, she was wonderful, more wonderful, perhaps, than when

later, to Glennard's fancy at least, the conscious of memorable things uttered seemed to take from even her

most intimate speech the perfect bloom of privacy. It was in those earliest days, if ever, that he had come near

loving her; though even then his sentiment had lived only in the intervals of its expression. Later, when to be

loved by her had been a state to touch any man's imagination, the physical reluctance had, inexplicably, so

overborne the intellectual attraction, that the last years had been, to both of them, an agony of conflicting

impulses. Even now, if, in turning over old papers, his hand lit on her letters, the touch filled him with

"She had so few intimate friends . . . that letters will be of special value." So few intimate friends! For years

she had had but one; one who in the last years had requited her wonderful pages, her tragic outpourings of

love, humility, and pardon, with the scant phrases by which a man evades the vulgarest of sentimental

importunities. He had been a brute in spite of himself, and sometimes, now that the remembrance of her face

had faded, and only her voice and words remained with him, he chafed at his own inadequacy, his stupid

inability to rise to the height of her passion. His egoism was not of a kind to mirror its complacency in the

adventure. To have been loved by the most brilliant woman of her day, and to have been incapable of loving

her, seemed to him, in looking back, the most derisive evidence of his limitations; and his remorseful

tenderness for her memory was complicated with a sense of irritation against her for having given him once

for all the measure of his emotional capacity. It was not often, however, that he thus probed the past. The

public, in taking possession of Mrs. Aubyn, had eased his shoulders of their burden. There was something

fatuous in an attitude of sentimental apology toward a memory already classic: to reproach one's self for not

having loved Margaret Aubyn was a good deal like being disturbed by an inability to admire the Venus of

Milo. From her cold niche of fame she looked down ironically enough on his selfflagellations. . . . It was

only when he came on something that belonged to her that he felt a sudden renewal of the old feeling, the

strange dual impulse that drew him to her voice but drove him from her hand, so that even now, at sight of

anything she had touched, his heart contracted painfully. It happened seldom nowadays. Her little presents,

one by one, had disappeared from his rooms, and her letters, kept from some unacknowledged puerile vanity

"Her letters will be of special value" Her letters! Why, he must have hundreds of themenough to fill a

volume. Sometimes it used to seem to him that they came with every posthe used to avoid looking in his

letterbox when he came home to his rooms but her writing seemed to spring out at him as he put his key

He stood up and strolled into the other room. Hollingsworth, lounging away from the window, had joined

himself to a languidly convivial group of men to whom, in phrases as halting as though they struggled to

define an ultimate idea, he was expounding the cursed nuisance of living in a hole with such a damned

climate that one had to get out of it by February, with the contingent difficulty of there being no place to take

one's yacht to in winter but that other playedout hole, the Riviera. From the outskirts of this group Glennard

wandered to another, where a voice as different as possible from Hollingsworth's colorless organ dominated

"Come and hear Dinslow talk about his patent: admission free," one of the men sang out in a tone of mock

Dinslow turned to Glennard the confident pugnacity of his smile. "Give it another six months and it'll be

Dinslow's smile broadened. "You'll be deuced glad to say papa to IT a year from now," he retorted. "It'll be

able to support even you in affluence. Look here, now, just let me explain to you"

Glennard moved away impatiently. The men at the cluball but those who were "in it"were proverbially

"tired" of Dinslow's patent, and none more so than Glennard, whose knowledge of its merits made it loom

large in the depressing catalogue of lost opportunities. The relations between the two men had always been

friendly, and Dinslow's urgent offers to "take him in on the ground floor" had of late intensified Glennard's

sense of his own inability to meet good luck half way. Some of the men who had paused to listen were

already in evening clothes, others on their way home to dress; and Glennard, with an accustomed twinge of

humiliation, said to himself that if he lingered among them it was in the miserable hope that one of the

number might ask him to dine. Miss Trent had told him that she was to go to the opera that evening with her

rich aunt; and if he should have the luck to pick up a dinnerinvitation he might join her there without extra

He moved about the room, lingering here and there in a tentative affectation of interest; but though the men

greeted him pleasantly no one asked him to dine. Doubtless they were all engaged, these men who could

afford to pay for their dinners, who did not have to hunt for invitations as a beggar rummages for a crust in an

ash barrel! But noas Hollingsworth left the lessening circle about the table an admiring youth called

Hollingsworth turned on him the crude countenance that looked like the wrong side of a more finished face.

Glennard threw himself into an armchair. Why go home in the rain to dress? It was folly to take a cab to the

opera, it was worse folly to go there at all. His perpetual meetings with Alexa Trent were as unfair to the girl

as they were unnerving to himself. Since he couldn't marry her, it was time to stand aside and give a better

man the chanceand his thought admitted the ironical implication that in the terms of expediency the phrase

He dined alone and walked home to his rooms in the rain. As he turned into Fifth Avenue he caught the wet

gleam of carriages on their way to the opera, and he took the first side street, in a moment of irritation against

the petty restrictions that thwarted every impulse. It was ridiculous to give up the opera, not because one

In his sittingroom, the tacit connivance of the inanimate had centred the lamplight on a photograph of

Alexa Trent, placed, in the obligatory silver frame, just where, as memory officiously reminded him,

Margaret Aubyn's picture had long throned in its stead. Miss Trent's features cruelly justified the usurpation.

She had the kind of beauty that comes of a happy accord of face and spirit. It is not given to many to have the

lips and eyes of their rarest mood, and some women go through life behind a mask expressing only their

anxiety about the butcher's bill or their inability to see a joke. With Miss Trent, face and mind had the same

high serious contour. She looked like a throned Justice by some grave Florentine painter; and it seemed to

Glennard that her most salient attribute, or that at least to which her conduct gave most consistent expression,

was a kind of passionate justicethe intuitive feminine justness that is so much rarer than a reasoned

impartiality. Circumstances had tragically combined to develop this instinct into a conscious habit. She had

seen more than most girls of the shabby side of life, of the perpetual tendency of want to cramp the noblest

attitude. Poverty and misfortune had overhung her childhood and she had none of the pretty delusions about

life that are supposed to be the crowning grace of girlhood. This very competence, which gave her a touching

reasonableness, made Glennard's situation more difficult than if he had aspired to a princess bred in the

purple. Between them they asked so little they knew so well how to make that little dobut they

understood also, and she especially did not for a moment let him forget, that without that little the future they

The sight of her photograph quickened Glennard's exasperation. He was sick and ashamed of the part he was

playing. He had loved her now for two years, with the tranquil tenderness that gathers depth and volume as it

nears fulfilment; he knew that she would wait for himbut the certitude was an added pang. There are times

when the constancy of the woman one cannot marry is almost as trying as that of the woman one does not

Glennard turned up his readinglamp and stirred the fire. He had a long evening before him and he wanted to

crowd out thought with action. He had brought some papers from his office and he spread them out on his

It must have been an hour later that he found himself automatically fitting a key into a locked drawer. He had

no more notion than a somnambulist of the mental process that had led up to this action. He was just dimly

aware of having pushed aside the papers and the heavy calf volumes that a moment before had bounded his

horizon, and of laying in their place, without a trace of conscious volition, the parcel he had taken from the

The letters were tied in packets of thirty or forty. There were a great many packets. On some of the envelopes

the ink was fading; on others, which bore the English postmark, it was still fresh. She had been dead hardly

He undid one of the earlier packetslittle notes written during their first acquaintance at Hillbridge.

Glennard, on leaving college, had begun life in his uncle's law office in the old university town. It was there

that, at the house of her father, Professor Forth, he had first met the young lady then chiefly distinguished for

having, after two years of a conspicuously unhappy marriage, returned to the protection of the paternal roof.

Mrs. Aubyn was at that time an eager and somewhat tragic young woman, of complex mind and undeveloped

manners, whom her crude experience of matrimony had fitted out with a stock of generalizations that

exploded like bombs in the academic air of Hillbridge. In her choice of a husband she had been fortunate

enough, if the paradox be permitted, to light on one so signally gifted with the faculty of putting himself in

the wrong that her leaving him had the dignity of a manifestomade her, as it were, the spokeswoman of

outraged wifehood. In this light she was cherished by that dominant portion of Hillbridge society which was

least indulgent to conjugal differences, and which found a proportionate pleasure in being for once able to

feast openly on a dish liberally seasoned with the outrageous. So much did this endear Mrs. Aubyn to the

university ladies that they were disposed from the first to allow her more latitude of speech and action than

the illused wife was generally accorded in Hillbridge, where misfortune was still regarded as a visitation

designed to put people in their proper place and make them feel the superiority of their neighbors. The young

woman so privileged combined with a kind of personal shyness an intellectual audacity that was like a

deflected impulse of coquetry: one felt that if she had been prettier she would have had emotions instead of

ideas. She was in fact even then what she had always remained: a genius capable of the acutest

generalizations, but curiously undiscerning where her personal susceptibilities were concerned. Her

psychology failed her just where it serves most women and one felt that her brains would never be a guide to

her heart. Of all this, however, Glennard thought little in the first year of their acquaintance. He was at an age

when all the gifts and graces are but so much undiscriminated food to the ravening egoism of youth. In

seeking Mrs. Aubyn's company he was prompted by an intuitive taste for the best as a pledge of his own

superiority. The sympathy of the cleverest woman in Hillbridge was balm to his craving for distinction: it was

public confirmation of his secret sense that he was cut out for a bigger place. It must not be understood that

Glennard was vain. Vanity contents itself with the coarsest diet; there is no palate so fastidious as that of

selfdistrust. To a youth of Glennard's aspirations the encouragement of a clever woman stood for the symbol

of all success. Later, when he had begun to feel his way, to gain a foothold, he would not need such support;

but it served to carry him lightly and easily over what is often a period of insecurity and discouragement.

It would be unjust, however, to represent his interest in Mrs. Aubyn as a matter of calculation. It was as

instinctive as love, and it missed being love by just such a hairbreadth deflection from the line of beauty as

had determined the curve of Mrs. Aubyn's lips. When they met she had just published her first novel, and

Glennard, who afterward had an ambitious man's impatience of distinguished women, was young enough to

be dazzled by the semipublicity it gave her. It was the kind of book that makes elderly ladies lower their

voices and call each other "my dear" when they furtively discuss it; and Glennard exulted in the superior

knowledge of the world that enabled him to take as a matter of course sentiments over which the university

shook its head. Still more delightful was it to hear Mrs. Aubyn waken the echoes of academic

drawingrooms with audacities surpassing those of her printed page. Her intellectual independence gave a

touch of comradeship to their intimacy, prolonging the illusion of college friendships based on a joyous

interchange of heresies. Mrs. Aubyn and Glennard represented to each other the augur's wink behind the

Hillbridge idol: they walked together in that light of young omniscience from which fate so curiously

Husbands who are notoriously inopportune, may even die inopportunely, and this was the revenge that Mr.

Aubyn, some two years after her return to Hillbridge, took upon his injured wife. He died precisely at the

moment when Glennard was beginning to criticise her. It was not that she bored him; she did what was

infinitely worseshe made him feel his inferiority. The sense of mental equality had been gratifying to his

raw ambition; but as his selfknowledge defined itself, his understanding of her also increased; and if man is

at times indirectly flattered by the moral superiority of woman, her mental ascendency is extenuated by no

such oblique tribute to his powers. The attitude of looking up is a strain on the muscles; and it was becoming

more and more Glennard's opinion that brains, in a woman, should be merely the obverse of beauty. To

beauty Mrs. Aubyn could lay no claim; and while she had enough prettiness to exasperate him by her

incapacity to make use of it, she seemed invincibly ignorant of any of the little artifices whereby women

contrive to palliate their defects and even to turn them into graces. Her dress never seemed a part of her; all

her clothes had an impersonal air, as though they had belonged to someone else and been borrowed in an

emergency that had somehow become chronic. She was conscious enough of her deficiencies to try to amend

them by rash imitations of the most approved models; but no woman who does not dress well intuitively will

ever do so by the light of reason, and Mrs. Aubyn's plagiarisms, to borrow a metaphor of her trade, somehow

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair. The fame that came to Mrs. Aubyn

with her second book left Glennard's imagination untouched, or had at most the negative effect of removing

her still farther from the circle of his contracting sympathies. We are all the sport of time; and fate had so

perversely ordered the chronology of Margaret Aubyn's romance that when her husband died Glennard felt as

It was not in his nature to be needlessly unkind; and though he was in the impregnable position of the man

who has given a woman no more definable claim on him than that of letting her fancy that he loves her, he

would not for the world have accentuated his advantage by any betrayal of indifference. During the first year

of her widowhood their friendship dragged on with halting renewals of sentiment, becoming more and more a

banquet of empty dishes from which the covers were never removed; then Glennard went to New York to

live and exchanged the faded pleasures of intercourse for the comparative novelty of correspondence. Her

letters, oddly enough, seemed at first to bring her nearer than her presence. She had adopted, and she

successfully maintained, a note as affectionately impersonal as his own; she wrote ardently of her work, she

questioned him about his, she even bantered him on the inevitable pretty girl who was certain before long to

divert the current of his confidences. To Glennard, who was almost a stranger in New York, the sight of Mrs.

Aubyn's writing was like a voice of reassurance in surroundings as yet insufficiently aware of him. His vanity

found a retrospective enjoyment in the sentiment his heart had rejected, and this factitious emotion drove him

once or twice to Hillbridge, whence, after scenes of evasive tenderness, he returned dissatisfied with himself

and her. As he made room for himself in New York and peopled the space he had cleared with the sympathies

at the disposal of agreeable and selfconfident young men, it seemed to him natural to infer that Mrs. Aubyn

had refurnished in the same manner the void he was not unwilling his departure should have left. But in the

dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the

same time; and Glennard gradually learned that he stood for the venture on which Mrs. Aubyn had

irretrievably staked her all. It was not the kind of figure he cared to cut. He had no fancy for leaving havoc in

his wake and would have preferred to sow a quick growth of oblivion in the spaces wasted by his

unconsidered inroads; but if he supplied the seed it was clearly Mrs. Aubyn's business to see to the raising of

the crop. Her attitude seemed indeed to throw his own reasonableness into distincter relief: so that they might

It was not that Mrs. Aubyn permitted herself to be a pensioner on his bounty. He knew she had no wish to

keep herself alive on the small change of sentiment; she simply fed on her own funded passion, and the

luxuries it allowed her made him, even then, dimly aware that she had the secret of an inexhaustible alchemy.

Their relations remained thus negatively tender till she suddenly wrote him of her decision to go abroad to

live. Her father had died, she had no near ties in Hillbridge, and London offered more scope than New York

to her expanding personality. She was already famous and her laurels were yet unharvested.

For a moment the news roused Glennard to a jealous sense of lost opportunities. He wanted, at any rate, to

reassert his power before she made the final effort of escape. They had not met for over a year, but of course

he could not let her sail without seeing her. She came to New York the day before her departure, and they

spent its last hours together. Glennard had planned no course of actionhe simply meant to let himself drift.

They both drifted, for a long time, down the languid current of reminiscence; she seemed to sit passive,

letting him push his way back through the overgrown channels of the past. At length she reminded him that

they must bring their explorations to an end. He rose to leave, and stood looking at her with the same

uncertainty in his heart. He was tired of her alreadyhe was always tired of heryet he was not sure that he

"I may never see you again," he said, as though confidently appealing to her compassion.

"To be nearer you," she answered; and the words dismissed him like a closing door.

The door was never to reopen; but through its narrow crack Glennard, as the years went on, became more and

more conscious of an inextinguishable light directing its small ray toward the past which consumed so little

of his own commemorative oil. The reproach was taken from this thought by Mrs. Aubyn's gradual

translation into terms of universality. In becoming a personage she so naturally ceased to be a person that

Glennard could almost look back to his explorations of her spirit as on a visit to some famous shrine,

Her letters, from London, continued to come with the same tender punctuality; but the altered conditions of

her life, the vistas of new relationships disclosed by every phrase, made her communications as impersonal as

a piece of journalism. It was as though the state, the world, indeed, had taken her off his hands, assuming the

maintenance of a temperament that had long exhausted his slender store of reciprocity.

In the retrospective light shed by the letters he was blinded to their specific meaning. He was not a man who

concerned himself with literature, and they had been to him, at first, simply the extension of her brilliant talk,

later the dreaded vehicle of a tragic importunity. He knew, of course, that they were wonderful; that, unlike

the authors who give their essence to the public and keep only a dry rind for their friends, Mrs. Aubyn had

stored of her rarest vintage for this hidden sacrament of tenderness. Sometimes, indeed, he had been

oppressed, humiliated almost, by the multiplicity of her allusions, the wide scope of her interests, her

persistence in forcing her superabundance of thought and emotion into the shallow receptacle of his

sympathy; but he had never thought of the letters objectively, as the production of a distinguished woman;

had never measured the literary significance of her oppressive prodigality. He was almost frightened now at

the wealth in his hands; the obligation of her love had never weighed on him like this gift of her imagination:

it was as though he had accepted from her something to which even a reciprocal tenderness could not have

He sat a long time staring at the scattered pages on his desk; and in the sudden realization of what they meant

he could almost fancy some alchemistic process changing them to gold as he stared. He had the sense of not

being alone in the room, of the presence of another self observing from without the stirring of subconscious

impulses that sent flushes of humiliation to his forehead. At length he stood up, and with the gesture of a man

who wishes to give outward expression to his purposeto establish, as it were, a moral alibiswept the

letters into a heap and carried them toward the grate. But it would have taken too long to burn all the packets.

He turned back to the table and one by one fitted the pages into their envelopes; then he tied up the letters and

It was one of the laws of Glennard's intercourse with Miss Trent that he always went to see her the day after

he had resolved to give her up. There was a special charm about the moments thus snatched from the jaws of

renunciation; and his sense of their significance was on this occasion so keen that he hardly noticed the added

His feeling for her had become so vital a part of him that her nearness had the quality of imperceptibly

readjusting his point of view, so that the jumbled phenomena of experience fell at once into a rational

perspective. In this redistribution of values the sombre retrospect of the previous evening shrank to a mere

cloud on the edge of consciousness. Perhaps the only service an unloved woman can render the man she loves

is to enhance and prolong his illusions about her rival. It was the fate of Margaret Aubyn's memory to serve

as a foil to Miss Trent's presence, and never had the poor lady thrown her successor into more vivid relief.

Miss Trent had the charm of still waters that are felt to be renewed by rapid currents. Her attention spread a

tranquil surface to the demonstrations of others, and it was only in days of storm that one felt the pressure of

the tides. This inscrutable composure was perhaps her chief grace in Glennard's eyes. Reserve, in some

natures, implies merely the locking of empty rooms or the dissimulation of awkward encumbrances; but Miss

Trent's reticence was to Glennard like the closed door to the sanctuary, and his certainty of divining the

hidden treasure made him content to remain outside in the happy expectancy of the neophyte.

"You didn't come to the opera last night," she began, in the tone that seemed always rather to record a fact

He answered with a discouraged gesture. "What was the use? We couldn't have talked."

"Not as well as here," she assented; adding, after a meditative pause, "As you didn't come I talked to Aunt

"Ah!" he returned, the fact being hardly striking enough to detach him from the contemplation of her hands,

which had fallen, as was their wont, into an attitude full of plastic possibilities. One felt them to be hands

that, moving only to some purpose, were capable of intervals of serene inaction.

"We had a long talk," Miss Trent went on; and she waited again before adding, with the increased absence of

stress that marked her graver communications, "Aunt Virginia wants me to go abroad with her."

He permitted himself a movement of tender derision. "Does she really? Well, I want you to go abroad with

"Only one of them seems to require immediate consideration," she returned, with a smile.

Her gaze dropped and she unclasped her hands. Her movements were so rare that they might have been said

to italicize her words. "Aunt Virginia talked to me very seriously. It will be a great relief to mother and the

others to have me provided for in that way for two years. I must think of that, you know." She glanced down

at her gown which, under a renovated surface, dated back to the first days of Glennard's wooing. "I try not to

They sat silent till at length she gently took up the argument. "As the eldest, you know, I'm bound to consider

these things. Women are such a burden. Jim does what he can for mother, but with his own children to

"Exactlythat's the rich relation all over! You may be miserable in any way you like, but if you're to be

"Of courseI see that. And I see your considerateness in putting its advantages negatively."

"In dwelling simply on what the going will take you from, not on what it will bring you to. It means a lot to a

woman, of course, to get away from a life like this." He summed up in a disparaging glance the background

She seemed to accept the full consequences of his thought. "I only know I don't like leaving it."

He stood up and walked across the room. Then he came back and paused before her. "On the alternative of

The slow coloreven her blushes seemed deliberaterose to her lower lids; her lips stirred, but the words

He took another turn, with the thwarted step of the man whose nervous exasperation escapes through his

"The cursed irony of it! What do I care for the man I shall be then? It's slaving one's life away for a stranger!"

He took her hands abruptly. "You'll go to Cannes, I suppose, or Monte Carlo? I heard Hollingsworth say

"I don't. I almost wish I did. It would be easier, I mean." He broke off incoherently. "I believe your Aunt

Virginia does, though. She somehow connotes Hollingsworth and the Mediterranean." He caught her hands

"In one of those places where they make jokes about the mosquitoes," he pressed her. "Could you get on with

"I don't know," he stammered, the question giving unexpected form to his intention. "It's all in the air yet, of

"Lord, no. This is a sure thingI almost wish it wasn't; I mean if I can work it" He had a sudden vision of

the comprehensiveness of the temptation. If only he had been less sure of Dinslow! His assurance gave the

"Trust me, instead!" he adjured her, with sudden energy; and turning on her abruptly, "If you go, you know,

Glennard, the next afternoon, leaving his office earlier than usual, turned, on his way home, into one of the

He had the place to himself at that closing hour, and the librarian was able to give an undivided attention to

his tentative request for letterscollections of letters. The librarian suggested Walpole.

Glennard cursed his own inarticulateness. "I mean letters toto some one persona man; their

"Wellsomething a little nearer, perhaps," said Glennard, with lightness. "Didn't Merimee"

"Ah!" Glennard hesitated. "Was shewere they?" He chafed at his own ignorance of the sentimental

"If you want loveletters, perhaps some of the French eighteenth century correspondences might suit you

But Glennard insisted. "I want something modernEnglish or American. I want to look something up," he

"Well, give me some of the French things, thenand I'll have Merimee's letters. It was the woman who

He caught up his armful, transferring it, on the doorstep, to a cab which carried him to his rooms. He dined

alone, hurriedly, at a small restaurant near by, and returned at once to his books.

Late that night, as he undressed, he wondered what contemptible impulse had forced from him his last words

to Alexa Trent. It was bad enough to interfere with the girl's chances by hanging about her to the obvious

exclusion of other men, but it was worse to seem to justify his weakness by dressing up the future in delusive

ambiguities. He saw himself sinking from depth to depth of sentimental cowardice in his reluctance to

renounce his hold on her; and it filled him with selfdisgust to think that the highest feeling of which he

His awakening was hardly cheered by the sight of her writing. He tore her note open and took in the few

linesshe seldom exceeded the first pagewith the lucidity of apprehension that is the forerunner of evil.

"My aunt sails on Saturday and I must give her my answer the day after tomorrow. Please don't come till

thenI want to think the question over by myself. I know I ought to go. Won't you help me to be

It was settled, then. Well, he would be reasonable; he wouldn't stand in her way; he would let her go. For two

years he had been living some other, luckier man's life; the time had come when he must drop back into his

own. He no longer tried to look ahead, to grope his way through the endless labyrinth of his material

"Hullo, Glennard!" a voice said, as an electriccar, late that afternoon, dropped him at an uptown corner.

He looked up and met the interrogative smile of Barton Flamel, who stood on the curbstone watching the

retreating car with the eye of a man philosophic enough to remember that it will be followed by another.

Glennard felt his usual impulse of pleasure at meeting Flamel; but it was not in this case curtailed by the

reaction of contempt that habitually succeeded it. Probably even the few men who had known Flamel since

his youth could have given no good reason for the vague mistrust that he inspired. Some people are judged by

their actions, others by their ideas; and perhaps the shortest way of defining Flamel is to say that his

wellknown leniency of view was vaguely divined to include himself. Simple minds may have resented the

discovery that his opinions were based on his perceptions; but there was certainly no more definite charge

against him than that implied in the doubt as to how he would behave in an emergency, and his company was

looked upon as one of those mildly unwholesome dissipations to which the prudent may occasionally yield. It

now offered itself to Glennard as an easy escape from the obsession of moral problems, which somehow

"Where are you going? To the club?" Flamel asked; adding, as the younger man assented, "Why not come to

The apartment which Flamel described as his studio showed, as its one claim to the designation, a perennially

empty easel; the rest of its space being filled with the evidences of a comprehensive dilettanteism. Against

this background, which seemed the visible expression of its owner's intellectual tolerance, rows of fine books

Glennard glanced with the eye of untrained curiosity at the lines of warmtoned morocco, while his host

"They're fairly decent," the other assented, in the curt tone of the collector who will not talk of his passion for

fear of talking of nothing else; then, as Glennard, his hands in his pockets, began to stroll perfunctorily down

the long line of bookcases "Some men," Flamel irresistibly added, "think of books merely as tools, others

as tooling. I'm between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as

society; so that, as you see, my library represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the

Glennard, without answering, was mechanically taking one book after another from the shelves. His hands

slipped curiously over the smooth covers and the noiseless subsidence of opening pages. Suddenly he came

"Ah, you're at my manuscript shelf. I've been going in for that sort of thing lately." Flamel came up and

looked over his shoulders. "That's a bit of Stendhalone of the Italian stories and here are some letters of

"His sister." He was conscious that Flamel was looking at him with the smile that was like an interrogation

"I don'tat least I've never had the chance. Have you many collections of letters?"

"Lord, novery few. I'm just beginning, and most of the interesting ones are out of my reach. Here's a queer

little collection, thoughthe rarest thing I've gothalf a dozen of Shelley's letters to Harriet Westbrook. I

Glennard, taking the volume from his hand, glanced with a kind of repugnance at the interleaving of yellow

Flamel nodded. "I suppose that little episode adds about fifty per cent. to their value," he said, meditatively.

Glennard laid the book down. He wondered why he had joined Flamel. He was in no humor to be amused by

the older man's talk, and a recrudescence of personal misery rose about him like an icy tide.

He turned to go; but almost at the same moment he was conscious of a duality of intention wherein his

apparent wish to leave revealed itself as a last effort of the will against the overmastering desire to stay and

The older man, as though divining the conflict, laid a detaining pressure on his arm.

"Won't the engagement keep? Sit down and try one of these cigars. I don't often have the luck of seeing you

"I'm rather driven just now," said Glennard, vaguely. He found himself seated again, and Flamel had pushed

to his side a low stand holding a bottle of Apollinaris and a decanter of cognac.

Flamel, thrown back in his capacious armchair, surveyed him through a cloud of smoke with the

comfortable tolerance of the man to whom no inconsistencies need be explained. Connivance was implicit in

the air. It was the kind of atmosphere in which the outrageous loses its edge. Glennard felt a gradual relaxing

"I suppose one has to pay a lot for letters like that?" he heard himself asking, with a glance in the direction of

"Oh, sododepends on circumstances." Flamel viewed him thoughtfully. "Are you thinking of collecting?"

"A poor chap I used to knowwho diedhe died last yearand who left me a lot of letters, letters he

thought a great deal ofhe was fond of me and left 'em to me outright, with the idea, I suppose, that they

might benefit me somehowI don't knowI'm not much up on such things" he reached his hand to the

"Oh, only one name. They're all letters written to himby one person, you understand; a woman, in fact"

Glennard was nettled by his obvious loss of interest. "I rather think they'd attract a good deal of notice if they

"Oh, justthe letters a woman would write to a man she knew well. They were tremendous friends, he and

A great silence filled the room. It seemed to Glennard that the words had burst from him as blood gushes

"Great Scott!" said Flamel, sitting up. "A collection of Margaret Aubyn's letters? Did you say YOU had

"I see. Was hewell, no matter. You're to be congratulated, at any rate. What are you going to do with

Glennard stood up with a sense of weariness in all his bones. "Oh, I don't know. I haven't thought much about

Glennard had lounged across the room and stood staring up at a bronze Bacchus who drooped his garlanded

head above the pediment of an Italian cabinet. "What ought I to do? You're just the fellow to advise me." He

"I want to publish them," said Glennard, swinging round with sudden energy"If I can"

"They're mine fast enough. There's no one to preventI mean there are no restrictions" he was arrested by

the sense that these accumulated proofs of impunity might precisely stand as the strongest check on his

Glennard had turned his unseeing stare on an ecstatic Saint Catherine framed in tarnished gilding.

"It's just this way," he began again, with an effort. "When letters are as personal asas these of my friend's. .

. . Well, I don't mind telling you that the cash would make a heap of difference to me; such a lot that it rather

obscures my judgment the fact is if I could lay my hand on a few thousands now I could get into a big

thing, and without appreciable risk; and I'd like to know whether you think I'd be justifiedunder the

circumstances. . . ." He paused, with a dry throat. It seemed to him at the moment that it would be impossible

for him ever to sink lower in his own estimation. He was in truth less ashamed of weighing the temptation

than of submitting his scruples to a man like Flamel, and affecting to appeal to sentiments of delicacy on the

absence of which he had consciously reckoned. But he had reached a point where each word seemed to

compel another, as each wave in a stream is forced forward by the pressure behind it; and before Flamel

could speak he had faltered out"You don't think people could say . . . could criticise the man. . . ."

Flamel hesitated; and almost immediately Glennard's scruples gave way to irritation. If at this hour Flamel

The older man's answer reassured him. "Why need you assume any responsibility? Your name won't appear,

of course; and as to your friend's, I don't see why his should, either. He wasn't a celebrity himself, I suppose?"

"Then the letters can be addressed to Mr. Blank. Doesn't that make it all right?"

Glennard's hesitation revived. "For the public, yes. But I don't see that it alters the case for me. The question

"Of course you ought to." Flamel spoke with invigorating emphasis. "I doubt if you'd be justified in keeping

them back. Anything of Margaret Aubyn's is more or less public property by this time. She's too great for any

one of us. I was only wondering how you could use them to the best advantageto yourself, I mean. How

"I don't knowthat isthey corresponded for years. What's the odds?" He moved toward his hat with a

"It all counts," said Flamel, imperturbably. "A long correspondenceone, I mean, that covers a great deal of

timeis obviously worth more than if the same number of letters had been written within a year. At any rate,

"Oh, nothingonly the big public is sentimental, and if they WEREwhy, you could get any money for

"Are the letters interesting in themselves? I mean apart from the association with her name?"

"I'm no judge." Glennard took up his hat and thrust himself into his overcoat. "I dare say I sha'n't do anything

"Lord, no. Well, I congratulate you. You've got a big thing." Flamel was smiling at him from the hearth.

Glennard, on the threshold, forced a response to the smile, while he questioned with loitering

Glennard's hand lingered on the knob. "How muchshould you say? You know about such things."

"Oh, I should have to see the letters; but I should saywell, if you've got enough to fill a book and they're

fairly readable, and the book is brought out at the right timesay ten thousand down from the publisher, and

possibly one or two more in royalties. If you got the publishers bidding against each other you might do even

"Of course," said Glennard, with sudden dizziness. His hand had slipped from the knob and he stood staring

"Of courseyou'd have to see them. . . ." Glennard stammered; and, without turning, he flung over his

The little house, as Glennard strolled up to it between the trees, seemed no more than a gay tent pitched

against the sunshine. It had the crispness of a freshly starched summer gown, and the geraniums on the

veranda bloomed as simultaneously as the flowers in a bonnet. The garden was prospering absurdly. Seed

they had sown at randomamid laughing countercharges of incompetencehad shot up in fragrant

defiance of their blunders. He smiled to see the clematis unfolding its punctual wings about the porch. The

tiny lawn was smooth as a shaven cheek, and a crimson rambler mounted to the nurserywindow of a baby

who never cried. A breeze shook the awning above the teatable, and his wife, as he drew near, could be seen

bending above a kettle that was just about to boil. So vividly did the whole scene suggest the painted bliss of

a stage setting, that it would have been hardly surprising to see her step forward among the flowers and trill

The stale heat of the long day in town, the dusty promiscuity of the suburban train were now but the requisite

foil to an evening of scented breezes and tranquil talk. They had been married more than a year, and each

homecoming still reflected the freshness of their first day together. If, indeed, their happiness had a flaw, it

was in resembling too closely the bright impermanence of their surroundings. Their love as yet was but the

His wife looked up with a smile. The country life suited her, and her beauty had gained depth from a stillness

"Just enough to enjoy this." He rose from the chair in which he had thrown himself and bent over the tray for

his cream. "You've had a visitor?" he commented, noticing a halfempty cup beside her own.

She answered without show of surprise. "He left just now. His yacht is down at Laurel Bay and he borrowed

Glennard made no comment, and she went on, leaning her head back against the cushions of her

Glennard meditatively stirred his tea. He was trying to think of the most natural and unartificial thing to say,

and his voice seemed to come from the outside, as though he were speaking behind a marionette. "Do you

"Just as you please," she said, compliantly. No affectation of indifference could have been as baffling as her

compliance. Glennard, of late, was beginning to feel that the surface which, a year ago, he had taken for a

sheet of clear glass, might, after all, be a mirror reflecting merely his own conception of what lay behind it.

"Do you like Flamel?" he suddenly asked; to which, still engaged with her tea, she returned the feminine

"I do, of course," he agreed, vexed at his own incorrigible tendency to magnify Flamel's importance by

She made no reply and he drew forth the rolledup evening papers which he had thrust into his pocket on

leaving the train. As he smoothed them out his own countenance seemed to undergo the same process. He ran

his eye down the list of stocks and Flamel's importunate personality receded behind the rows of figures

pushing forward into notice like so many bearers of good news. Glennard's investments were flowering like

his garden: the dryest shares blossomed into dividends, and a golden harvest awaited his sickle.

He glanced at his wife with the tranquil air of the man who digests good luck as naturally as the dry ground

absorbs a shower. "Things are looking uncommonly well. I believe we shall be able to go to town for two or

She smiled luxuriously: it was pleasant to be able to say, with an air of balancing relative advantages,

"Really, on the baby's account I shall be almost sorry; but if we do go, there's Kate Erskine's house . . . she'll

"Well, write her about it," he recommended, his eyes travelling on in search of the weather report. He had

turned to the wrong page; and suddenly a line of black characters leapt out at him as from an ambush.

"'Margaret Aubyn's Letters.' Two volumes. Out today. First edition of five thousand sold out before leaving

He looked up stupidly. His wife still sat with her head thrown back, her pure profile detached against the

cushions. She was smiling a little over the prospect his last words had opened. Behind her head shivers of sun

and shade ran across the striped awning. A row of maples and a privet hedge hid their neighbor's gables,

giving them undivided possession of their leafy halfacre; and life, a moment before, had been like their plot

of ground, shut off, hedged in from importunities, impenetrably his and hers. Now it seemed to him that

every mapleleaf, every privetbud, was a relentless human gaze, pressing close upon their privacy. It was as

though they sat in a brightly lit room, uncurtained from a darkness full of hostile watchers. . . . His wife still

smiled; and her unconsciousness of danger seemed, in some horrible way, to put her beyond the reach of

He had not known that it would be like this. After the first odious weeks, spent in preparing the letters for

publication, in submitting them to Flamel, and in negotiating with the publishers, the transaction had dropped

out of his consciousness into that unvisited limbo to which we relegate the deeds we would rather not have

done but have no notion of undoing. From the moment he had obtained Miss Trent's promise not to sail with

her aunt he had tried to imagine himself irrevocably committed. After that, he argued, his first duty was to

hershe had become his conscience. The sum obtained from the publishers by Flamel's adroit manipulations

and opportunely transferred to Dinslow's successful venture, already yielded a return which, combined with

Glennard's professional earnings, took the edge of compulsion from their way of living, making it appear the

expression of a graceful preference for simplicity. It was the mitigated poverty which can subscribe to a

review or two and have a few flowers on the dinner table. And already in a small way Glennard was

beginning to feel the magnetic quality of prosperity. Clients who had passed his door in the hungry days

sought it out now that it bore the name of a successful man. It was understood that a small inheritance,

cleverly invested, was the source of his fortune; and there was a feeling that a man who could do so well for

But it was in the more intimate reward of his wife's happiness that Glennard tasted the full flavor of success.

Coming out of conditions so narrow that those he offered her seemed spacious, she fitted into her new life

without any of those manifest efforts at adjustment that are as sore to a husband's pride as the critical

rearrangement of the bridal furniture. She had given him, instead, the delicate pleasure of watching her

expand like a seacreature restored to its element, stretching out the atrophied tentacles of girlish vanity and

enjoyment to the rising tide of opportunity. And somehowin the windowless inner cell of his

consciousness where selfcriticism coweredGlennard's course seemed justified by its merely material

success. How could such a crop of innocent blessedness have sprung from tainted soil?

Now he had the injured sense of a man entrapped into a disadvantageous bargain. He had not known it would

be like this; and a dull anger gathered at his heart. Anger against whom? Against his wife, for not knowing

what he suffered? Against Flamel, for being the unconscious instrument of his wrongdoing? Or against that

mute memory to which his own act had suddenly given a voice of accusation? Yes, that was it; and his

punishment henceforth would be the presence, the unescapable presence, of the woman he had so persistently

evaded. She would always be there now. It was as though he had married her instead of the other. It was what

He sprang up, as though in an impulse of flight. . . . The sudden movement lifted his wife's lids, and she

asked, in the incurious voice of the woman whose life is enclosed in a magic circle of prosperity"Any

"Nonone" he said, roused to a sense of immediate peril. The papers lay scattered at his feetwhat if

she were to see them? He stretched his arm to gather them up, but his next thought showed him the futility of

such concealment. The same advertisement would appear every day, for weeks to come, in every newspaper;

how could he prevent her seeing it? He could not always be hiding the papers from her. . . . Well, and what if

she did see it? It would signify nothing to her, the chances were that she would never even read the book. . . .

As she ceased to be an element of fear in his calculations the distance between them seemed to lessen and he

took her again, as it were, into the circle of his conjugal protection. . . . Yet a moment before he had almost

hated her! . . . He laughed aloud at his senseless terrors. . . . He was off his balance, decidedly.

He explained, elaborately, that he was laughing at the recollection of an old woman in the train, an old

woman with a lot of bundles, who couldn't find her ticket. . . . But somehow, in the telling, the humor of the

story seemed to evaporate, and he felt the conventionality of her smile. He glanced at his watch, "Isn't it time

She rose with serene reluctance. "It's a pity to go in. The garden looks so lovely."

They lingered side by side, surveying their domain. There was not space in it, at this hour, for the shadow of

the elmtree in the angle of the hedge; it crossed the lawn, cut the flowerborder in two, and ran up the side

of the house to the nursery window. She bent to flick a caterpillar from the honeysuckle; then, as they

turned indoors, "If we mean to go on the yacht next Sunday," she suggested, "oughtn't you to let Mr. Flamel

Glennard's exasperation deflected suddenly. "Of course I shall let him know. You always seem to imply that

The words reverberated through her silence; she had a way of thus leaving one space in which to contemplate

one's folly at arm's length. Glennard turned on his heel and went upstairs. As he dropped into a chair before

his dressingtable he said to himself that in the last hour he had sounded the depths of his humiliation and

that the lowest dregs of it, the very bottomslime, was the hateful necessity of having always, as long as the

THE week in town had been sultry, and the men, in the Sunday emancipation of white flannel and duck,

filled the deckchairs of the yacht with their outstretched apathy, following, through a mist of

cigarettesmoke, the flitting inconsequences of the women. The part was a small oneFlamel had few

intimate friendsbut composed of more heterogeneous atoms than the little pools into which society usually

runs. The reaction from the chief episode of his earlier life had bred in Glennard an uneasy distaste for any

kind of personal saliency. Cleverness was useful in business; but in society it seemed to him as futile as the

sham cascades formed by a stream that might have been used to drive a mill. He liked the collective point of

view that goes with the civilized uniformity of dressclothes, and his wife's attitude implied the same

preference; yet they found themselves slipping more and more into Flamel's intimacy. Alexa had once or

twice said that she enjoyed meeting clever people; but her enjoyment took the negative form of a smiling

receptivity; and Glennard felt a growing preference for the kind of people who have their thinking done for

Still, the deck of the yacht was a pleasant refuge from the heat on shore, and his wife's profile, serenely

projected against the changing blue, lay on his retina like a cool hand on the nerves. He had never been more

impressed by the kind of absoluteness that lifted her beauty above the transient effects of other women,

The ladies who directly suggested this comparison were of a kind accustomed to take similar risks with more

gratifying results. Mrs. Armiger had in fact long been the triumphant alternative of those who couldn't "see"

Alexa Glennard's looks; and Mrs. Touchett's claims to consideration were founded on that distribution of

effects which is the wonder of those who admire a highly cultivated country. The third lady of the trio which

Glennard's fancy had put to such unflattering uses, was bound by circumstances to support the claims of the

other two. This was Mrs. Dresham, the wife of the editor of the Radiator. Mrs. Dresham was a lady who had

rescued herself from social obscurity by assuming the role of her husband's exponent and interpreter; and

Dresham's leisure being devoted to the cultivation of remarkable women, his wife's attitude committed her to

the public celebration of their remarkableness. For the conceivable tedium of this duty, Mrs. Dresham was

repaid by the fact that there were people who took HER for a remarkable woman; and who in turn probably

purchased similar distinction with the small change of her reflected importance. As to the other ladies of the

party, they were simply the wives of some of the menthe kind of women who expect to be talked to

Mrs. Armiger, the latest embodiment of Dresham's instinct for the remarkable, was an innocent beauty who

for years had distilled dulness among a set of people now selfcondemned by their inability to appreciate her.

Under Dresham's tutelage she had developed into a "thoughtful woman," who read his leaders in the Radiator

and bought the books he recommended. When a new novel appeared, people wanted to know what Mrs.

Armiger thought of it; and a young gentleman who had made a trip in Touraine had recently inscribed to her

Glennard, leaning back with his head against the rail and a slit of fugitive blue between his halfclosed lids,

vaguely wished she wouldn't spoil the afternoon by making people talk; though he reduced his annoyance to

the minimum by not listening to what was said, there remained a latent irritation against the general futility of

His wife's gift of silence seemed to him the most vivid commentary on the clumsiness of speech as a means

of intercourse, and his eyes had turned to her in renewed appreciation of this finer faculty when Mrs.

Armiger's voice abruptly brought home to him the underrated potentialities of language.

"You've read them, of course, Mrs. Glennard?" he heard her ask; and, in reply to Alexa's vague

interrogation"Why, the 'Aubyn Letters'it's the only book people are talking of this week."

Mrs. Dresham immediately saw her advantage. "You HAVEN'T read them? How very extraordinary! As

Mrs. Armiger says, the book's in the air; one breathes it in like the influenza."

"Perhaps it hasn't reached the suburbs yet," she said, with her unruffled smile.

"Oh, DO let me come to you, then!" Mrs. Touchett cried; "anything for a change of air! I'm positively sick of

the book and I can't put it down. Can't you sail us beyond its reach, Mr. Flamel?"

Flamel shook his head. "Not even with this breeze. Literature travels faster than steam nowadays. And the

worst of it is that we can't any of us give up reading; it's as insidious as a vice and as tiresome as a virtue."

"I believe it IS a vice, almost, to read such a book as the 'Letters,'" said Mrs. Touchett. "It's the woman's soul,

absolutely torn up by the rootsher whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn't care; who

couldn't have cared. I don't mean to read another line; it's too much like listening at a keyhole."

"Why, I heard she'd left the letters to the manwhoever he is with directions that they should be

"Why, you don't suppose if he were alive he could ever hold up his head again, with these letters being read

by everybody?" Mrs. Touchett protested. "It must have been horrible enough to know they'd been written to

him; but to publish them! No man could have done it and no woman could have told him to"

"Oh, come, come," Dresham judicially interposed; "after all, they're not loveletters."

"Then, obviously, she needn't have written them; whereas the man, poor devil, could hardly help receiving

"Perhaps he counted on the public to save him the trouble of reading them," said young Hartly, who was in

Mrs. Armiger turned her reproachful loveliness to Dresham. "From the way you defend him, I believe you

Everyone looked at Dresham, and his wife smiled with the superior air of the woman who is in her husband's

"A man who could let Margaret Aubyn write to him in that way? Of course I pity him."

"Then you MUST know who he is," cried Mrs. Armiger, with a triumphant air of penetration.

Hartly and Flamel laughed and Dresham shook his head. "No one knows; not even the publishers; so they tell

"So they tell you to tell us," Hartly astutely amended; and Mrs. Armiger added, with the appearance of

carrying the argument a point farther, "But even if HE'S dead and SHE'S dead, somebody must have given

"Oh, I'm not with you there," said Dresham, easily. "Those letters belonged to the public."

"How can any letters belong to the public that weren't written to the public?" Mrs. Touchett interposed.

"Well, these were, in a sense. A personality as big as Margaret Aubyn's belongs to the world. Such a mind is

part of the general fund of thought. It's the penalty of greatnessone becomes a monument historique.

Posterity pays the cost of keeping one up, but on condition that one is always open to the public."

"I don't see that that exonerates the man who gives up the keys of the sanctuary, as it were."

"Who was he? Oh, nobody, I fancythe letterbox, the slit in the wall through which the letters passed to

"A woman shouldn't write such letters if she doesn't mean them to be published. . . ."

"I never keep letters," said Mrs. Armiger, under the obvious impression that she was contributing a valuable

There was a general laugh, and Flamel, who had not spoken, said, lazily, "You women are too incurably

subjective. I venture to say that most men would see in those letters merely their immense literary value, their

significance as documents. The personal side doesn't count where there's so much else."

"Oh, we all know you haven't any principles," Mrs. Armiger declared; and Alexa Glennard, lifting an

Glennard moved away impatiently. Such talk was as tedious as the buzzing of gnats. He wondered why his

wife had wanted to drag him on such a senseless expedition. . . . He hated Flamel's crowd and what

business had Flamel himself to interfere in that way, standing up for the publication of the letters as though

Glennard turned his head and saw that Flamel had drawn a seat to Alexa's elbow and was speaking to her in a

low tone. The other groups had scattered, straying in twos along the deck. It came over Glennard that he

should never again be able to see Flamel speaking to his wife without the sense of sick mistrust that now

Alexa, the next morning, over their early breakfast, surprised her husband by an unexpected request.

"What letters?" he said, putting down his cup. He felt himself as helplessly vulnerable as a man who is lunged

Glennard, carefully measuring his second cup of tea, said, with deliberation, "I didn't know you cared about

She was, in fact, not a great reader, and a new book seldom reached her till it was, so to speak, on the home

stretch; but she replied, with a gentle tenacity, "I think it would interest me because I read her life last year."

His first impulse was to exclaim, "Why the devil do you borrow books of Flamel? I can buy you all you

want" but he felt himself irresistibly forced into an attitude of smiling compliance. "Flamel always has the

newest books going, hasn't he? You must be careful, by the way, about returning what he lends you. He's

"Oh, I'm always very careful," she said, with a touch of competence that struck him; and she added, as he

Why had she asked for the book? Was her sudden wish to see it the result of some hint of Flamel's? The

thought turned Glennard sick, but he preserved sufficient lucidity to tell himself, a moment later, that his last

hope of selfcontrol would be lost if he yielded to the temptation of seeing a hidden purpose in everything

she said and did. How much Flamel guessed, he had no means of divining; nor could he predicate, from what

he knew of the man, to what use his inferences might be put. The very qualities that had made Flamel a useful

adviser made him the most dangerous of accomplices. Glennard felt himself agrope among alien forces that

Alexa was a woman of few requirements; but her wishes, even in trifles, had a definiteness that distinguished

them from the fluid impulses of her kind. He knew that, having once asked for the book, she would not forget

it; and he put aside, as an ineffectual expedient, his momentary idea of applying for it at the circulating

library and telling her that all the copies were out. If the book was to be bought it had better be bought at

once. He left his office earlier than usual and turned in at the first bookshop on his way to the train. The

showwindow was stacked with conspicuously lettered volumes. "Margaret Aubyn" flashed back at him in

endless repetition. He plunged into the shop and came on a counter where the name reiterated itself on row

after row of bindings. It seemed to have driven the rest of literature to the back shelves. He caught up a copy,

tossing the money to an astonished clerk who pursued him to the door with the unheeded offer to wrap up the

In the street he was seized with a sudden apprehension. What if he were to meet Flamel? The thought was

intolerable. He called a cab and drove straight to the station where, amid the palmleaf fans of a perspiring

He had thrust a volume in either pocket and in the train he dared not draw them out; but the detested words

leaped at him from the folds of the evening paper. The air seemed full of Margaret Aubyn's name. The

motion of the train set it dancing up and down on the page of a magazine that a man in front of him was

At the door he was told that Mrs. Glennard was still out, and he went upstairs to his room and dragged the

books from his pocket. They lay on the table before him like live things that he feared to touch. . . . At length

he opened the first volume. A familiar letter sprang out at him, each word quickened by its glaring garb of

type. The little broken phrases fled across the page like wounded animals in the open. . . . It was a horrible

sight. . . . A battue of helpless things driven savagely out of shelter. He had not known it would be like this. . .

He understood now that, at the moment of selling the letters, he had viewed the transaction solely as it

affected himself: as an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise presentable record. He had scarcely considered

the act in relation to Margaret Aubyn; for death, if it hallows, also makes innocuous. Glennard's God was a

god of the living, of the immediate, the actual, the tangible; all his days he had lived in the presence of that

god, heedless of the divinities who, below the surface of our deeds and passions, silently forge the fatal

A knock roused him and looking up he saw his wife. He met her glance in silence, and she faltered out, "Are

The words restored his selfpossession. "Ill? Of course not. They told me you were out and I came upstairs."

The books lay between them on the table; he wondered when she would see them. She lingered tentatively on

the threshold, with the air of leaving his explanation on his hands. She was not the kind of woman who could

"Where have you been?" Glennard asked, moving forward so that he obstructed her vision of the books.

"I can't think what you see in those people," he said with a shrug; adding, uncontrollably"I suppose Flamel

An answer so obstructing to the natural escape of his irritation left Glennard with no momentary resource but

that of strolling impatiently to the window. As her eyes followed him they lit on the books.

He answered over his shoulder, "For a woman who never reads you make the most astounding exceptions!"

Her smile was an exasperating concession to the probability that it had been hot in town or that something

"Do you mean it's not nice to want to read the book?" she asked. "It was not nice to publish it, certainly; but

after all, I'm not responsible for that, am I?" She paused, and, as he made no answer, went on, still smiling, "I

do read sometimes, you know; and I'm very fond of Margaret Aubyn's books. I was reading 'Pomegranate

Seed' when we first met. Don't you remember? It was then you told me all about her."

Glennard had turned back into the room and stood staring at his wife. "All about her?" he repeated, and with

the words remembrance came to him. He had found Miss Trent one afternoon with the novel in her hand, and

moved by the lover's fatuous impulse to associate himself in some way with whatever fills the mind of the

beloved, had broken through his habitual silence about the past. Rewarded by the consciousness of figuring

impressively in Miss Trent's imagination he had gone on from one anecdote to another, reviving dormant

details of his old Hillbridge life, and pasturing his vanity on the eagerness with which she received his

The incident had left no trace in his mind; but it sprang up now like an old enemy, the more dangerous for

having been forgotten. The instinct of selfpreservationsometimes the most perilous that man can

exercisemade him awkwardly declare"Oh, I used to see her at people's houses, that was all;" and her

silence as usual leaving room for a multiplication of blunders, he added, with increased indifference, "I

Glennard felt the sudden dizziness of the mountaineer on a narrow ledge, and with it the sense that he was

"I'm sure I don't know," he said; then, summoning a smile, he passed his hand through her arm. "I didn't have

That evening Glennard, under pretext of work to be done, shut himself into the small study opening off the

drawingroom. As he gathered up his papers he said to his wife: "You're not going to sit indoors on such a

But she had drawn her armchair to the lamp. "I want to look at my book," she said, taking up the first volume

Glennard, with a shrug, withdrew into the study. "I'm going to shut the door; I want to be quiet," he explained

He sank into a chair, staring aimlessly at the outspread papers. How was he to work, while on the other side

of the door she sat with that volume in her hand? The door did not shut her outhe saw her distinctly, felt

The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him feel like a man waking from a long sleep to

find himself in an unknown country among people of alien tongue. We live in our own souls as in an

unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those

nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours. Of the points in his wife's character not in direct

contact with his own, Glennard now discerned his ignorance; and the baffling sense of her remoteness was

intensified by the discovery that, in one way, she was closer to him than ever before. As one may live for

years in happy unconsciousness of the possession of a sensitive nerve, he had lived beside his wife unaware

that her individuality had become a part of the texture of his life, ineradicable as some growth on a vital

organ; and he now felt himself at once incapable of forecasting her judgment and powerless to evade its

To escape, the next morning, the confidences of the breakfast table, he went to town earlier than usual. His

wife, who read slowly, was given to talking over what she read, and at present his first object in life was to

postpone the inevitable discussion of the letters. This instinct of protection in the afternoon, on his way

uptown, guided him to the club in search of a man who might be persuaded to come out to the country to

Glennard, as he heard himself almost involuntarily pressing Flamel to come and dine, felt the full irony of the

situation. To use Flamel as a shield against his wife's scrutiny was only a shade less humiliating than to

He felt a contradictory movement of annoyance at the latter's ready acceptance, and the two men drove in

silence to the station. As they passed the bookstall in the waitingroom Flamel lingered a moment and the

eyes of both fell on Margaret Aubyn's name, conspicuously displayed above a counter stacked with the

Glennard turned on his heel and walked down the platform. Flamel rejoined him with an innocentlooking

magazine in his hand; but Glennard dared not even glance at the cover, lest it should show the syllables he

The train was full of people they knew, and they were kept apart till it dropped them at the little suburban

station. As they strolled up the shaded hill, Glennard talked volubly, pointing out the improvements in the

neighborhood, deploring the threatened approach of an electric railway, and screening himself by a series of

reflex adjustments from the imminent risk of any allusion to the "Letters." Flamel suffered his discourse with

the bland inattention that we accord to the affairs of someone else's suburb, and they reached the shelter of

The dinner passed off safely. Flamel, always at his best in Alexa's presence, gave her the kind of attention

which is like a beaconing light thrown on the speaker's words: his answers seemed to bring out a latent

significance in her phrases, as the sculptor draws his statue from the block. Glennard, under his wife's

composure, detected a sensibility to this manoeuvre, and the discovery was like the lightningflash across a

nocturnal landscape. Thus far these momentary illuminations had served only to reveal the strangeness of the

intervening country: each fresh observation seemed to increase the sumtotal of his ignorance. Her simplicity

of outline was more puzzling than a complex surface. One may conceivably work one's way through a

labyrinth; but Alexa's candor was like a snowcovered plain where, the road once lost, there are no

Dinner over, they returned to the veranda, where a moon, rising behind the old elm, was combining with that

complaisant tree a romantic enlargement of their borders. Glennard had forgotten the cigars. He went to his

study to fetch them, and in passing through the drawingroom he saw the second volume of the "Letters"

lying open on his wife's table. He picked up the book and looked at the date of the letter she had been

reading. It was one of the last . . . he knew the few lines by heart. He dropped the book and leaned against the

wall. Why had he included that one among the others? Or was it possible that now they would all seem like

Alexa's voice came suddenly out of the dusk. "May Touchett was rightit IS like listening at a keyhole. I

Flamel returned, in the leisurely tone of the man whose phrases are punctuated by a cigarette, "It seems so to

"Then it ought not to have been published till it had become a classic. It's horrible, it's degrading almost, to

read the secrets of a woman one might have known." She added, in a lower tone, "Stephen DID know her"

"He knew her very well, at Hillbridge, years ago. The book has made him feel dreadfully . . . he wouldn't read

it . . . he didn't want me to read it. I didn't understand at first, but now I can see how horribly disloyal it must

seem to him. It's so much worse to surprise a friend's secrets than a stranger's."

"Oh, Glennard's such a sensitive chap," Flamel said, easily; and Alexa almost rebukingly rejoined, "If you'd

Glennard stood motionless, overcome by the singular infelicity with which he had contrived to put Flamel in

possession of the two points most damaging to his case: the fact that he had been a friend of Margaret

Aubyn's, and that he had concealed from Alexa his share in the publication of the letters. To a man of less

than Flamel's astuteness it must now be clear to whom the letters were addressed; and the possibility once

suggested, nothing could be easier than to confirm it by discreet research. An impulse of selfaccusal drove

Glennard to the window. Why not anticipate betrayal by telling his wife the truth in Flamel's presence? If the

man had a drop of decent feeling in him, such a course would be the surest means of securing his silence; and

above all, it would rid Glennard of the necessity of defending himself against the perpetual criticism of his

The impulse was strong enough to carry him to the window; but there a reaction of defiance set in. What had

he done, after all, to need defence and explanation? Both Dresham and Flamel had, in his hearing, declared

the publication of the letters to be not only justifiable but obligatory; and if the disinterestedness of Flamel's

verdict might be questioned, Dresham's at least represented the impartial view of the man of letters. As to

Alexa's words, they were simply the conventional utterance of the "nice" woman on a question already

decided for her by other "nice" women. She had said the proper thing as mechanically as she would have put

on the appropriate gown or written the correct form of dinnerinvitation. Glennard had small faith in the

abstract judgments of the other sex; he knew that half the women who were horrified by the publication of

The sudden lowering of his emotional pitch brought a proportionate relief. He told himself that now the worst

was over and things would fall into perspective again. His wife and Flamel had turned to other topics, and

coming out on the veranda, he handed the cigars to Flamel, saying, cheerfullyand yet he could have sworn

they were the last words he meant to utter!"Look here, old man, before you go down to Newport you must

Glennard had, perhaps unconsciously, counted on the continuance of this easier mood. He had always taken

pride in a certain robustness of fibre that enabled him to harden himself against the inevitable, to convert his

failures into the building materials of success. Though it did not even now occur to him that what he called

the inevitable had hitherto been the alternative he happened to prefer, he was yet obscurely aware that his

present difficulty was one not to be conjured by any affectation of indifference. Some griefs build the soul a

spacious housebut in this misery of Glennard's he could not stand upright. It pressed against him at every

turn. He told himself that this was because there was no escape from the visible evidences of his act. The

"Letters" confronted him everywhere. People who had never opened a book discussed them with critical

reservations; to have read them had become a social obligation in circles to which literature never penetrates

Glennard did himself injustice. it was from the unexpected discovery of his own pettiness that he chiefly

suffered. Our selfesteem is apt to be based on the hypothetical great act we have never had occasion to

perform; and even the most self scrutinizing modesty credits itself negatively with a high standard of

conduct. Glennard had never thought himself a hero; but he had been certain that he was incapable of

baseness. We all like our wrongdoings to have a becoming cut, to be made to order, as it were; and

Glennard found himself suddenly thrust into a garb of dishonor surely meant for a meaner figure.

The immediate result of his first weeks of wretchedness was the resolve to go to town for the winter. He

knew that such a course was just beyond the limit of prudence; but it was easy to allay the fears of Alexa

who, scrupulously vigilant in the management of the household, preserved the American wife's usual

aloofness from her husband's business cares. Glennard felt that he could not trust himself to a winter's

solitude with her. He had an unspeakable dread of her learning the truth about the letters, yet could not be

sure of steeling himself against the suicidal impulse of avowal. His very soul was parched for sympathy; he

thirsted for a voice of pity and comprehension. But would his wife pity? Would she understand? Again he

found himself brought up abruptly against his incredible ignorance of her nature. The fact that he knew well

enough how she would behave in the ordinary emergencies of life, that he could count, in such contingencies,

on the kind of high courage and directness he had always divined in her, made him the more hopeless of her

entering into the torturous psychology of an act that he himself could no longer explain or understand. It

would have been easier had she been more complex, more feminineif he could have counted on her

imaginative sympathy or her moral obtusenessbut he was sure of neither. He was sure of nothing but that,

for a time, he must avoid her. Glennard could not rid himself of the delusion that by and by his action would

cease to make its consequences felt. He would not have cared to own to himself that he counted on the

dulling of his sensibilities: he preferred to indulge the vague hypothesis that extraneous circumstances would

somehow efface the blot upon his conscience. In his worst moments of selfabasement he tried to find solace

in the thought that Flamel had sanctioned his course. Flamel, at the outset, must have guessed to whom the

letters were addressed; yet neither then nor afterward had he hesitated to advise their publication. This

thought drew Glennard to him in fitful impulses of friendliness, from each of which there was a sharper

reaction of distrust and aversion. When Flamel was not at the house, he missed the support of his tacit

connivance; when he was there, his presence seemed the assertion of an intolerable claim.

Early in the winter the Glennards took possession of the little house that was to cost them almost nothing.

The change brought Glennard the immediate relief of seeing less of his wife, and of being protected, in her

presence, by the multiplied preoccupations of town life. Alexa, who could never appear hurried, showed the

smiling abstraction of a pretty woman to whom the social side of married life has not lost its novelty.

Glennard, with the recklessness of a man fresh from his first financial imprudence, encouraged her in such

little extravagances as her good sense at first resisted. Since they had come to town, he argued, they might as

well enjoy themselves. He took a sympathetic view of the necessity of new gowns, he gave her a set of furs at

Christmas, and before the New Year they had agreed on the obligation of adding a parlourmaid to their

Providence the very next day hastened to justify this measure by placing on Glennard's breakfastplate an

envelope bearing the name of the publishers to whom he had sold Mrs. Aubyn's letters. It happened to be the

only letter the early post had brought, and he glanced across the table at his wife, who had come down before

him and had probably laid the envelope on his plate. She was not the woman to ask awkward questions, but

he felt the conjecture of her glance, and he was debating whether to affect surprise at the receipt of the letter,

or to pass it off as a business communication that had strayed to his house, when a check fell from the

envelope. It was the royalty on the first edition of the letters. His first feeling was one of simple satisfaction.

The money had come with such infernal opportuneness that he could not help welcoming it. Before long, too,

there would be more; he knew the book was still selling far beyond the publisher's previsions. He put the

On the way to his office the habitual reaction set in. The money he had received was the first tangible

reminder that he was living on the sale of his selfesteem. The thought of material benefit had been

overshadowed by his sense of the intrinsic baseness of making the letters known; now he saw what an

element of sordidness it added to the situation and how the fact that he needed the money, and must use it,

pledged him more irrevocably than ever to the consequences of his act. It seemed to him, in that first hour of

When, that afternoon, he reached home earlier than usual, Alexa's drawingroom was full of a gayety that

overflowed to the stairs. Flamel, for a wonder, was not there; but Dresham and young Hartly, grouped about

the teatable, were receiving with resonant mirth a narrative delivered in the fluttered staccato that made Mrs.

She paused as Glennard entered, and he had time to notice that his wife, who was busied about the teatray,

"Oh, go on, go on," young Hartly rapturously groaned; and Mrs. Armiger met Glennard's inquiry with the

deprecating cry that really she didn't see what there was to laugh at. "I'm sure I feel more like crying. I don't

know what I should have done if Alexa hadn't been home to give me a cup of tea. My nerves are in

shredsyes, another, dear, please" and as Glennard looked his perplexity, she went on, after pondering on

the selection of a second lump of sugar, "Why, I've just come from the reading, you knowthe reading at the

"I haven't been in town long enough to know anything," said Glennard, taking the cup his wife handed him.

"That lovely girl from the SouthGeorgieGeorgie what's her nameMrs. Dresham's protegeeunless

she's YOURS, Mr. Dresham! Why, the big ballroom was PACKED, and all the women were crying like

"What DID you hear?" Glennard asked; and his wife interposed: "Won't you have another bit of cake, Julia?

Or, Stephen, ring for some hot toast, please." Her tone betrayed a polite satiety of the topic under discussion.

Glennard turned to the bell, but Mrs. Armiger pursued him with her lovely amazement.

"Why, the "Aubyn Letters"didn't you know about it? The girl read them so beautifully that it was quite

horribleI should have fainted if there'd been a man near enough to carry me out."

Hartly's glee redoubled, and Dresham said, jovially, "How like you women to raise a shriek over the book

Mrs. Armiger met him more than halfway on a torrent of self accusal. "It WAS horrid; it was disgraceful. I

told your wife we ought all to be ashamed of ourselves for going, and I think Alexa was quite right to refuse

"Oh," her hostess murmured, indifferently, "with me charity begins at home. I can't afford emotional

"A charity? A charity?" Hartly exulted. "I hadn't seized the full beauty of it. Reading poor Margaret Aubyn's

loveletters at the Waldorf before five hundred people for a charity! WHAT charity, dear Mrs. Armiger?"

"It was well chosen," Dresham commented; and Hartly buried his mirth in the sofacushions.

When they were alone Glennard, still holding his untouched cup of tea, turned to his wife, who sat silently

"It's just the sort of damnable vulgarity she's capable of! It's loathsomeit's monstrous"

His wife, without looking up, answered gravely, "I thought so too. It was for that reason I didn't go. But you

Glennard managed to set down his cup with a steady hand, but the room swung round with him and he

"I mean that very few people knew her when she lived in New York. To most of the women who went to the

reading she was a mere name, too remote to have any personality. With me, of course, it was different"

"Her friend!" He stood up impatiently. "You speak as if she had had only onethe most famous woman of

her day!" He moved vaguely about the room, bending down to look at some books on the table. "I hope," he

"For not going. A woman who gives reasons for getting out of social obligations is sure to make herself

The words were uncalculated; but in an instant he saw that they had strangely bridged the distance between

his wife and himself. He felt her close on him, like a panting foe; and her answer was a flash that showed the

"I seem," she said from the threshold, "to have done both in giving my reason to you."

The fact that they were dining out that evening made it easy for him to avoid Alexa till she came downstairs

in her operacloak. Mrs. Touchett, who was going to the same dinner, had offered to call for her, and

Glennard, refusing a precarious seat between the ladies' draperies, followed on foot. The evening was

interminable. The reading at the Waldorf, at which all the women had been present, had revived the

discussion of the "Aubyn Letters" and Glennard, hearing his wife questioned as to her absence, felt himself

miserably wishing that she had gone, rather than that her staying away should have been remarked. He was

rapidly losing all sense of proportion where the "Letters" were concerned. He could no longer hear them

mentioned without suspecting a purpose in the allusion; he even yielded himself for a moment to the

extravagance of imagining that Mrs. Dresham, whom he disliked, had organized the reading in the hope of

making him betray himselffor he was already sure that Dresham had divined his share in the transaction.

The attempt to keep a smooth surface on this inner tumult was as endless and unavailing as efforts made in a

nightmare. He lost all sense of what he was saying to his neighbors and once when he looked up his wife's

She sat nearly opposite him, at Flamel's side, and it appeared to Glennard that they had built about themselves

one of those airy barriers of talk behind which two people can say what they please. While the reading was

discussed they were silent. Their silence seemed to Glennard almost cynicalit stripped the last disguise

from their complicity. A throb of anger rose in him, but suddenly it fell, and he felt, with a curious sense of

relief, that at bottom he no longer cared whether Flamel had told his wife or not. The assumption that Flamel

knew about the letters had become a fact to Glennard; and it now seemed to him better that Alexa should

He was frightened at first by the discovery of his own indifference. The last barriers of his will seemed to be

breaking down before a flood of moral lassitude. How could he continue to play his part, to keep his front to

the enemy, with this poison of indifference stealing through his veins? He tried to brace himself with the

remembrance of his wife's scorn. He had not forgotten the note on which their conversation had closed. If he

had ever wondered how she would receive the truth he wondered no longershe would despise him. But this

lent a new insidiousness to his temptation, since her contempt would be a refuge from his own. He said to

himself that, since he no longer cared for the consequences, he could at least acquit himself of speaking in

selfdefence. What he wanted now was not immunity but castigation: his wife's indignation might still

reconcile him to himself. Therein lay his one hope of regeneration; her scorn was the moral antiseptic that he

When they left the dinner he was so afraid of speaking that he let her drive home alone, and went to the club

HE rose next morning with the resolve to know what Alexa thought of him. It was not anchoring in a haven,

but lying to in a storm he felt the need of a temporary lull in the turmoil of his sensations.

He came home late, for they were dining alone and he knew that they would have the evening together. When

he followed her to the drawingroom after dinner he thought himself on the point of speaking; but as she

handed him his coffee he said, involuntarily: "I shall have to carry this off to the study, I've got a lot of work

Alone in the study he cursed his cowardice. What was it that had withheld him? A certain bright

unapproachableness seemed to keep him at arm's length. She was not the kind of woman whose compassion

could be circumvented; there was no chance of slipping past the outposts; he would never take her by

surprise. Wellwhy not face her, then? What he shrank from could be no worse than what he was enduring.

He had pushed back his chair and turned to go upstairs when a new expedient presented itself. What if,

instead of telling her, he were to let her find out for herself and watch the effect of the discovery before

The idea had been suggested by the sight of the formula enclosing the publisher's check. He had deposited the

money, but the notice accompanying it dropped from his notecase as he cleared his table for work. It was

the formula usual in such cases and revealed clearly enough that he was the recipient of a royalty on Margaret

Aubyn's letters. It would be impossible for Alexa to read it without understanding at once that the letters had

He sat downstairs till he heard her ring for the parlormaid to put out the lights; then he went up to the

drawingroom with a bundle of papers in his hand. Alexa was just rising from her seat and the lamplight fell

on the deep roll of hair that overhung her brow like the eaves of a temple. Her face had often the high

secluded look of a shrine; and it was this touch of awe in her beauty that now made him feel himself on the

Lest the feeling should dominate him, he spoke at once. "I've brought you a piece of worka lot of old bills

and things that I want you to sort for me. Some are not worth keepingbut you'll be able to judge of that.

There may be a letter or two among themnothing of much account, but I don't like to throw away the

He held out the papers and she took them with a smile that seemed to recognize in the service he asked the

"Oh, quite sure," he answered, easily"and besides, none are of much importance."

The next morning he invented an excuse for leaving the house without seeing her, and when he returned, just

before dinner, he found a visitor's hat and stick in the hall. The visitor was Flamel, who was in the act of

He had risen, but Alexa remained seated; and their attitude gave the impression of a colloquy that had

prolonged itself beyond the limits of speech. Both turned a surprised eye on Glennard and he had the sense of

walking into a room grown suddenly empty, as though their thoughts were conspirators dispersed by his

approach. He felt the clutch of his old fear. What if his wife had already sorted the papers and had told Flamel

of her discovery? Well, it was no news to Flamel that Glennard was in receipt of a royalty on the "Aubyn

A sudden resolve to know the worst made him lift his eyes to his wife as the door closed on Flamel. But

Alexa had risen also, and bending over her writingtable, with her back to Glennard, was beginning to speak

"I'm dining out tonightyou don't mind my deserting you? Julia Armiger sent me word just now that she

had an extra ticket for the last Ambrose concert. She told me to say how sorry she was that she hadn't

twobut I knew YOU wouldn't be sorry!" She ended with a laugh that had the effect of being a strayed echo

of Mrs. Armiger's; and before Glennard could speak she had added, with her hand on the door, "Mr. Flamel

stayed so late that I've hardly time to dress. The concert begins ridiculously early, and Julia dines at halfpast

Glennard stood alone in the empty room that seemed somehow full of an ironical consciousness of what was

The next day was Sunday, and Glennard purposely lingered late in his room. When he came downstairs his

wife was already seated at the breakfasttable. She lifted her usual smile to his entrance and they took shelter

in the nearest topic, like wayfarers overtaken by a storm. While he listened to her account of the concert he

began to think that, after all, she had not yet sorted the papers, and that her agitation of the previous day must

be ascribed to another cause, in which perhaps he had but an indirect concern. He wondered it had never

before occurred to him that Flamel was the kind of man who might very well please a woman at his own

expense, without need of fortuitous assistance. If this possibility cleared the outlook it did not brighten it.

Alexa left the breakfasttable before him and when he went up to the drawingroom he found her dressed to

She replied that, on the way there, she meant to stop a moment at her mother's; and while she drew on her

gloves, he fumbled among the knickknacks on the mantelpiece for a match to light his cigarette.

"Well, goodby," she said, turning to go; and from the threshold she added: "By the way, I've sorted the

papers you gave me. Those that I thought you would like to keep are on your studytable." She went

Glennard, he hardly knew how, found himself once more in the study. On the table lay the packet he had

given her. It was much smallershe had evidently gone over the papers with care, destroying the greater

number. He loosened the elastic band and spread the remaining envelopes on his desk. The publisher's notice

His wife knew and she made no sign. Glennard found himself in the case of the seafarer who, closing his eyes

at nightfall on a scene he thinks to put leagues behind him before day, wakes to a port hole framing the

same patch of shore. From the kind of exaltation to which his resolve had lifted him he dropped to an

unreasoning apathy. His impulse of confession had acted as a drug to self reproach. He had tried to shift a

portion of his burden to his wife's shoulders and now that she had tacitly refused to carry it, he felt the load

A fortunate interval of hard work brought respite from this phase of sterile misery. He went West to argue an

important case, won it, and came back to fresh preoccupations. His own affairs were thriving enough to

engross him in the pauses of his professional work, and for over two months he had little time to look himself

in the face. Not unnaturallyfor he was as yet unskilled in the subtleties of introspectionhe mistook his

He told himself that he was recovering his sense of proportion, getting to see things in their true light; and if

he now thought of his rash appeal to his wife's sympathy it was as an act of folly from the consequences of

which he had been saved by the providence that watches over madmen. He had little leisure to observe Alexa;

but he concluded that the commonsense momentarily denied him had counselled her uncritical acceptance

of the inevitable. If such a quality was a poor substitute for the passionate justness that had once seemed to

characterize her, he accepted the alternative as a part of that general lowering of the key that seems needful to

the maintenance of the matrimonial duet. What woman ever retained her abstract sense of justice where

another woman was concerned? Possibly the thought that he had profited by Mrs. Aubyn's tenderness was not

When the pressure of work began to lessen, and he found himself, in the lengthening afternoons, able to reach

home somewhat earlier, he noticed that the little drawingroom was always full and that he and his wife

seldom had an evening alone together. When he was tired, as often happened, she went out alone; the idea of

giving up an engagement to remain with him seemed not to occur to her. She had shown, as a girl, little

fondness for society, nor had she seemed to regret it during the year they had spent in the country. He

reflected, however, that he was sharing the common lot of husbands, who proverbially mistake the early

ardors of housekeeping for a sign of settled domesticity. Alexa, at any rate, was refuting his theory as

inconsiderately as a seedling defeats the gardener's expectations. An undefinable change had come over her.

In one sense it was a happy one, since she had grown, if not handsomer, at least more vivid and expressive;

her beauty had become more communicable: it was as though she had learned the conscious exercise of

intuitive attributes and now used her effects with the discrimination of an artist skilled in values. To a

dispassionate critic (as Glennard now rated himself) the art may at times have been a little too obvious. Her

attempts at lightness lacked spontaneity, and she sometimes rasped him by laughing like Julia Armiger; but

he had enough imagination to perceive that, in respect of the wife's social arts, a husband necessarily sees the

In this ironical estimate of their relation Glennard found himself strangely relieved of all concern as to his

wife's feelings for Flamel. From an Olympian pinnacle of indifference he calmly surveyed their inoffensive

antics. It was surprising how his cheapening of his wife put him at ease with himself. Far as he and she were

from each other they yet had, in a sense, the tacit nearness of complicity. Yes, they were accomplices; he

could no more be jealous of her than she could despise him. The jealousy that would once have seemed a blur

on her whiteness now appeared like a tribute to ideals in which he no longer believed. . . .

Glennard was little given to exploring the outskirts of literature. He always skipped the "literary notices" in

the papers and he had small leisure for the intermittent pleasures of the periodical. He had therefore no notion

of the prolonged reverberations which the "Aubyn Letters" had awakened in the precincts of criticism. When

the book ceased to be talked about he supposed it had ceased to be read; and this apparent subsidence of the

agitation about it brought the reassuring sense that he had exaggerated its vitality. The conviction, if it did not

ease his conscience, at least offered him the relative relief of obscurity: he felt like an offender taken down

But one evening, when Alexa had left him to go to a dance, he chanced to turn over the magazines on her

table, and the copy of the Horoscope, to which he settled down with his cigar, confronted him, on its first

page, with a portrait of Margaret Aubyn. It was a reproduction of the photograph that had stood so long on

his desk. The desiccating air of memory had turned her into the mere abstraction of a woman, and this

unexpected evocation seemed to bring her nearer than she had ever been in life. Was it because he understood

her better? He looked long into her eyes; little personal traits reached out to him like caressesthe tired

droop of her lids, her quick way of leaning forward as she spoke, the movements of her long expressive

hands. All that was feminine in her, the quality he had always missed, stole toward him from her

unreproachful gaze; and now that it was too late life had developed in him the subtler perceptions which

could detect it in even this poor semblance of herself. For a moment he found consolation in the thought that,

at any cost, they had thus been brought together; then a flood of shame rushed over him. Face to face with

her, he felt himself laid bare to the inmost fold of consciousness. The shame was deep, but it was a renovating

anguish; he was like a man whom intolerable pain has roused from the creeping lethargy of death. . . .

He rose next morning to as fresh a sense of life as though his hour of mute communion with Margaret Aubyn

had been a more exquisite renewal of their earlier meetings. His waking thought was that he must see her

again; and as consciousness affirmed itself he felt an intense fear of losing the sense of her nearness. But she

was still close to him; her presence remained the sole reality in a world of shadows. All through his working

hours he was reliving with incredible minuteness every incident of their obliterated past; as a man who has

mastered the spirit of a foreign tongue turns with renewed wonder to the pages his youth has plodded over. In

this lucidity of retrospection the most trivial detail had its significance, and the rapture of recovery was

embittered to Glennard by the perception of all that he had missed. He had been pitiably, grotesquely stupid;

and there was irony in the thought that, but for the crisis through which he was passing, he might have lived

on in complacent ignorance of his loss. It was as though she had bought him with her blood. . . .

That evening he and Alexa dined alone. After dinner he followed her to the drawingroom. He no longer felt

the need of avoiding her; he was hardly conscious of her presence. After a few words they lapsed into silence

and he sat smoking with his eyes on the fire. It was not that he was unwilling to talk to her; he felt a curious

desire to be as kind as possible; but he was always forgetting that she was there. Her full bright presence,

through which the currents of life flowed so warmly, had grown as tenuous as a shadow, and he saw so far

Presently she rose and began to move about the room. She seemed to be looking for something and he roused

"Only the last number of the Horoscope. I thought I'd left it on this table." He said nothing, and she went on:

His wife had moved to the mantelpiece. She stood facing him and as he looked up he met her tentative gaze.

"I was reading an article in ita review of Mrs. Aubyn's letters," she added, slowly, with her deep, deliberate

Glennard stooped to toss his cigar into the fire. He felt a savage wish that she would not speak the other

woman's name; nothing else seemed to matter. "You seem to do a lot of reading," he said.

She still earnestly confronted him. "I was keeping this for you I thought it might interest you," she said,

He stood up and turned away. He was sure she knew that he had taken the review and he felt that he was

"I haven't time for such things," he said, indifferently. As he moved to the door he heard her take a precipitate

step forward; then she paused and sank without speaking into the chair from which he had risen.

As Glennard, in the raw February sunlight, mounted the road to the cemetery, he felt the beatitude that comes

with an abrupt cessation of physical pain. He had reached the point where self analysis ceases; the impulse

that moved him was purely intuitive. He did not even seek a reason for it, beyond the obvious one that his

desire to stand by Margaret Aubyn's grave was prompted by no attempt at a sentimental reparation, but rather

The ironical promiscuity of death had brought Mrs. Aubyn back to share the narrow hospitality of her

husband's last lodging; but though Glennard knew she had been buried near New York he had never visited

her grave. He was oppressed, as he now threaded the long avenues, by a chilling vision of her return. There

was no family to follow her hearse; she had died alone, as she had lived; and the "distinguished mourners"

who had formed the escort of the famous writer knew nothing of the woman they were committing to the

grave. Glennard could not even remember at what season she had been buried; but his mood indulged the

fancy that it must have been on some such day of harsh sunlight, the incisive February brightness that gives

perspicuity without warmth. The white avenues stretched before him interminably, lined with stereotyped

emblems of affliction, as though all the platitudes ever uttered had been turned to marble and set up over the

unresisting dead. Here and there, no doubt, a frigid urn or an insipid angel imprisoned some finefibred grief,

as the most hackneyed words may become the vehicle of rare meanings; but for the most part the endless

alignment of monuments seemed to embody those easy generalizations about death that do not disturb the

repose of the living. Glennard's eye, as he followed the way indicated to him, had instinctively sought some

low mound with a quiet headstone. He had forgotten that the dead seldom plan their own houses, and with a

pang he discovered the name he sought on the cyclopean base of a granite shaft rearing its aggressive height

A bench stood near and he seated himself. The monument rose before him like some pretentious uninhabited

dwelling; he could not believe that Margaret Aubyn lay there. It was a Sunday morning and black figures

moved among the paths, placing flowers on the frostbound hillocks. Glennard noticed that the neighboring

graves had been thus newly dressed; and he fancied a blind stir of expectancy through the sod, as though the

bare mounds spread a parched surface to that commemorative rain. He rose presently and walked back to the

entrance of the cemetery. Several greenhouses stood near the gates, and turning in at the first he asked for

"Anything in the emblematic line?" asked the anaemic man behind the dripping counter.

"Just cut flowers? This way, then." The florist unlocked a glass door and led him down a moist green aisle.

The hot air was choked with the scent of white azaleas, white lilies, white lilacs; all the flowers were white;

they were like a prolongation, a mystical efflorescence, of the long rows of marble tombstones, and their

perfume seemed to cover an odor of decay. The rich atmosphere made Glennard dizzy. As he leaned in the

doorpost, waiting for the flowers, he had a penetrating sense of Margaret Aubyn's nearnessnot the

imponderable presence of his inner vision, but a life that beat warm in his arms. . . .

The sharp air caught him as he stepped out into it again. He walked back and scattered the flowers over the

grave. The edges of the white petals shrivelled like burnt paper in the cold; and as he watched them the

The motive of his visit to the cemetery remained undefined save as a final effort of escape from his wife's

inexpressive acceptance of his shame. It seemed to him that as long as he could keep himself alive to that

shame he would not wholly have succumbed to its consequences. His chief fear was that he should become

the creature of his act. His wife's indifference degraded him; it seemed to put him on a level with his

dishonor. Margaret Aubyn would have abhorred the deed in proportion to her pity for the man. The sense of

her potential pity drew him back to her. The one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it sometimes

In its last disguise of retrospective remorse, his selfpity affected a desire for solitude and meditation. He lost

himself in morbid musings, in futile visions of what life with Margaret Aubyn might have been. There were

moments when, in the strange dislocation of his view, the wrong he had done her seemed a tie between them.

To indulge these emotions he fell into the habit, on Sunday afternoons, of solitary walks prolonged till after

dusk. The days were lengthening, there was a touch of spring in the air, and his wanderings now usually led

One Sunday, tired of aimless locomotion, he took a cab at the Park gates and let it carry him out to the

Riverside Drive. It was a gray afternoon streaked with east wind. Glennard's cab advanced slowly, and as he

leaned back, gazing with absent intentness at the deserted paths that wound under bare boughs between grass

banks of premature vividness, his attention was arrested by two figures walking ahead of him. This couple,

who had the path to themselves,moved at an uneven pace, as though adapting their gait to a conversation

marked by meditative intervals. Now and then they paused, and in one of these pauses the lady, turning

toward her companion, showed Glennard the outline of his wife's profile. The man was Flamel.

The blood rushed to Glennard's forehead. He sat up with a jerk and pushed back the lid in the roof of the

hansom; but when the cabman bent down he dropped into his seat without speaking. Then, becoming

conscious of the prolonged interrogation of the lifted lid, he called out"Turndrive

As the cab swung round he caught a last glimpse of the two figures. They had not moved; Alexa, with bent

It was hideousit was abominablehe could not understand it. The woman was nothing to himless than

nothingyet the blood hummed in his ears and hung a cloud before him. He knew it was only the stirring of

the primal instinct, that it had no more to do with his reasoning self than any reflex impulse of the body; but

that merely lowered anguish to disgust. Yes, it was disgust he feltalmost a physical nausea. The poisonous

He drove home and went to his room. They were giving a little dinner that night, and when he came down the

guests were arriving. He looked at his wife: her beauty was extraordinary, but it seemed to him the beauty of

He sat late that night in his study. He heard the parlormaid lock the front door; then his wife went upstairs

and the lights were put out. His brain was like some great empty hall with an echo in it; one thought

reverberated endlessly. . . . At length he drew his chair to the table and began to write. He addressed an

"Many apologies for not sending you sooner the enclosed check, which represents the customary percentage

He let himself out of the darkened house and dropped the letter in the postbox at the corner.

The next afternoon he was detained late at his office, and as he was preparing to leave he heard someone

asking for him in the outer room. He seated himself again and Flamel was shown in.

The two men, as Glennard pushed aside an obstructive chair, had a moment to measure each other; then

Flamel advanced, and drawing out his notecase, laid a slip of paper on the desk.

Flamel's tone had been that of unaffected surprise, but at this his accent changed and he asked, quickly: "On

Glennard had moved away from the desk and stood leaning against the calfbacked volumes of the bookcase.

"On the ground that you sold Mrs. Aubyn's letters for me, and that I find the intermediary in such cases is

"Obviously, from my not sending the check sooner. You see I'm new to the business."

"And since when have you discovered that there was any question of business, as far as I was concerned?"

Glennard flushed and his voice rose slightly. "Are you reproaching me for not having remembered it sooner?"

Flamel, who had spoken in the rapid repressed tone of a man on the verge of anger, stared a moment at this

and then, in his natural voice, rejoined, goodhumoredly, "Upon my soul, I don't understand you!"

The change of key seemed to disconcert Glennard. "It's simple enough" he muttered.

"Simple enoughyour offering me money in return for a friendly service? I don't know what your other

"Some of my friends wouldn't have undertaken the job. Those who would have done so would probably have

He lifted his eyes to Flamel and the two men looked at each other. Flamel had turned white and his lips

stirred, but he held his temperate note. "If you mean to imply that the job was not a nice one, you lay yourself

open to the retort that you proposed it. But for my part I've never seen, I never shall see, any reason for not

"The certainty of your not seeing was what made me go to you. When a man's got stolen goods to pawn he

Glennard burst into a coarse laugh. "How much longer to you expect me to keep up that pretence about the

Flamel looked at him in silence. "Were they?" he said at length. "I didn't know it."

The other was again silent; then he said, "I may remind you that, supposing I had felt any curiosity about the

matter, I had no way of finding out that the letters were written to you. You never showed me the originals."

"What does that prove? There were fifty ways of finding out. It's the kind of thing one can easily do."

Flamel glanced at him with contempt. "Our ideas probably differ as to what a man can easily do. It would not

Glennard's anger vented itself in the words uppermost in his thought. "It may, then, interest you to hear that

"Ah," said the other, slowly. Glennard saw that, in his blind clutch at a weapon, he had seized the one most

apt to wound. Flamel's muscles were under control, but his face showed the undefinable change produced by

the slow infiltration of poison. Every implication that the words contained had reached its mark; but Glennard

felt that their obvious intention was lost in the anguish of what they suggested. He was sure now that Flamel

would never have betrayed him; but the inference only made a wider outlet for his anger. He paused

"Through you, by God? Who said it was through you? Do you suppose I leave it to you, or to anybody else,

for that matter, to keep my wife informed of my actions? I didn't suppose even such egregious conceit as

yours could delude a man to that degree!" Struggling for a foothold in the small landslide of his dignity, he

Flamel received this in silence. The other's outbreak seemed to have reinforced his selfcontrol, and when he

spoke it was with a deliberation implying that his course was chosen. "In that case I understand still less"

"The meaning of this." He pointed to the check. "When you began to speak I supposed you had meant it as a

bribe; now I can only infer it was intended as a random insult. In either case, here's my answer."

He tore the slip of paper in two and tossed the fragments across the desk to Glennard. Then he turned and

Glennard dropped his head on his hands. If he had hoped to restore his selfrespect by the simple expedient

of assailing Flamel's, the result had not justified his expectation. The blow he had struck had blunted the edge

of his anger, and the unforeseen extent of the hurt inflicted did not alter the fact that his weapon had broken

in his hands. He saw now that his rage against Flamel was only the last projection of a passionate self

disgust. This consciousness did not dull his dislike of the man; it simply made reprisals ineffectual. Flamel's

In the light of this final humiliation his assumption of his wife's indifference struck him as hardly so fatuous

as the sentimental resuscitation of his past. He had been living in a factitious world wherein his emotions

were the sycophants of his vanity, and it was with instinctive relief that he felt its ruins crash about his head.

It was nearly dark when he left his office, and he walked slowly homeward in the complete mental abeyance

that follows on such a crisis. He was not aware that he was thinking of his wife; yet when he reached his own

door he found that, in the involuntary readjustment of his vision, she had once more become the central point

It had never before occurred to him that she might, after all, have missed the purport of the document he had

put in her way. What if, in her hurried inspection of the papers, she had passed it over as related to the private

business of some client? What, for instance, was to prevent her concluding that Glennard was the counsel of

the unknown person who had sold the "Aubyn Letters." The subject was one not likely to fix her

Glennard at this point laid down his fork and glanced at her between the candleshades. The alternative

explanation of her indifference was not slow in presenting itself. Her head had the same listening droop as

when he had caught sight of her the day before in Flamel's company; the attitude revived the vividness of his

impression. It was simple enough, after all. She had ceased to care for him because she cared for someone

As he followed her upstairs he felt a sudden stirring of his dormant anger. His sentiments had lost all their

factitious complexity. He had already acquitted her of any connivance in his baseness, and he felt only that he

loved her and that she had escaped him. This was now, strangely enough, his dominating thought: the

consciousness that he and she had passed through the fusion of love and had emerged from it as

incommunicably apart as though the transmutation had never taken place. Every other passion, he mused, left

some mark upon the nature; but love passed like the flight of a ship across the waters.

She sank into her usual seat near the lamp, and he leaned against the chimney, moving about with an

Suddenly he caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She was looking at him. He turned and their eyes

She held his gaze, but her color deepened. He noticed again, with a jealous pang, how her beauty had gained

in warmth and meaning. It was as though a transparent cup had been filled with wine. He looked at her

"I've never prevented your seeing your friends here," he broke out. "Why do you meet Flamel in

"I saw you with him last Sunday on the Riverside Drive," he went on, the utterance of the charge reviving his

"Ah," she murmured. She sank into her chair again and began to play with a paperknife that lay on the table

"I imply nothing. I will tell you whatever you wish to know. I went for a walk with Mr. Flamel because he

"I didn't suppose you went uninvited. But there are certain things a sensible woman doesn't do. She doesn't

slink about in outoftheway streets with men. Why couldn't you have seen him here?"

"Did he, indeed? And may I ask if you gratify all his wishes with equal alacrity?"

"I don't know that he has any others where I am concerned." She paused again and then continued, in a lower

voice that somehow had an undernote of warning. "He wished to bid me goodby. He's going away."

The last phrase revived his irritation. "You forget that I depend on you for my information about Flamel. He's

your friend and not mine. In fact, I've sometimes wondered at your going out of your way to be so civil to

Her answer to this was not immediate. She seemed to be choosing her words with care, not so much for her

own sake as for his, and his exasperation was increased by the suspicion that she was trying to spare him.

"He was your friend before he was mine. I never knew him till I was married. It was you who brought him to

Glennard gave a short laugh. The defence was feebler than he had expected: she was certainly not a clever

"Your deference to my wishes is really beautiful; but it's not the first time in history that a man has made a

mistake in introducing his friends to his wife. You must, at any rate, have seen since then that my enthusiasm

"No," she answered with sudden directness. "I noticed some time ago that you seemed to dislike him, but

"I've imagined that you had reasons for still wishing me to be civil to him, as you call it."

"Ah," said Glennard, with an effort at lightness; but his irony dropped, for something in her voice made him

feel that he and she stood at last in that naked desert of apprehension where meaning skulks vainly behind

"And why did you imagine this?" The blood mounted to his forehead. "Because he told you that I was under

"Oh, don't let's beat about the bush. Didn't he tell you it was I who published Mrs. Aubyn's letters? Answer

"No," she said; and after a moment which seemed given to the weighing of alternatives, she added: "No one

He looked at her immovable face. "Had you suspectedbefore?" was slowly wrung from him.

There was a shade of pity in her glance. "No one said anything no one told me anything." She looked away

"Whenever the book was mentioned. Things you saidonce or twice your irritationI can't explain"

Glennard, unconsciously, had moved nearer. He breathed like a man who has been running. "You knew, then,

you knew"he stammered. The avowal of her love for Flamel would have hurt him less, would have

rendered her less remote. "You knewyou knew" he repeated; and suddenly his anguish gathered voice.

"My God!" he cried, "you suspected it first, you sayand then you knew it this damnable, this accursed

thing; you knew it months agoit's months since I put that paper in your wayand yet you've done nothing,

you've said nothing, you've made no sign, you've lived alongside of me as if it had made no differenceno

difference in either of our lives. What are you made of, I wonder? Don't you see the hideous ignominy of it?

Don't you see how you've shared in my disgrace? Or haven't you any sense of shame?"

He preserved sufficient lucidity, as the words poured from him, to see how fatally they invited her derision;

but something told him they had both passed beyond the phase of obvious retaliations, and that if any chord

An iron band seemed loosened from his temples. "You saw then . . .?" he whispered.

"Oh, Godoh, God" she sobbed. She dropped beside him and hid her anguish against his knees.

They clung thus in silence, a long time, driven together down the same fierce blast of shame.

When at length she lifted her face he averted his. Her scorn would have hurt him less than the tears on his

She spoke languidly, like a child emerging from a passion of weeping. "It was for the money?"

She drew back and rose to her feet. He sat watching her as she wandered away from him.

"That would have been so simple," she answered with a strange smile. She dropped into a chair near the

"The money?" That part of it seemed to count so little that for a moment he did not follow her thought.

He nodded. "Of course." He sat staring at her in dryeyed self contempt. "Do you count on its making much

"Good heavens! If there were any reparation" He rose quickly and crossed the space that divided them.

"Just nowwhen you told me you did it for me." She paused a moment and then went on with a deepening

He gazed at her with a kind of awe. "You're wonderful," he murmured. "But you don't yet know the depths

He stood imploringly before her. "I want to say something worse something more outrageous. If you don't

She answered him with a glance of divination. "I shall understandbut you'll be sorry."

"I must take my chance of that." He moved away and tossed the books about the table. Then he swung round

Her flush deepened, but she still looked at him without anger. "What would be the use?" she said with a note

To this adjuration he made no response beyond that of gazing at her with an eye which seemed now to view

"I insulted Flamel today. I let him see that I suspected him of having told you. I hated him because he knew

He caught the spreading horror of her eyes, and for an instant he had to grapple with the new temptation they

lit up. Then he said, with an effort"Don't blame himhe's impeccable. He helped me to get them

published; but I lied to him too; I pretended they were written to another man . . . a man who was dead. . . ."

"Be silent!" she commanded him; but he seemed no longer conscious of any check on his gathering purpose.

"He cared for youhe cared for you," he repeated, "and he never told you of the letters"

"Stephen! Stephen!" she cried, as though to drown the blasphemy on his lips. She swept to him with a

He put her back with trembling hands. "Nothing that I say of myself can degrade you. We're on different

The great renewals take effect as imperceptibly as the first workings of spring. Glennard, though he felt

himself brought nearer to his wife, was still, as it were, hardly within speaking distance. He was but

laboriously acquiring the rudiments of their new medium of communication; and he had to grope for her

through the dense fog of his humiliation, the distorting vapor against which his personality loomed grotesque

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them. Love is the

most impregnable refuge of selfesteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. If Glennard did

not hate his wife it was slowly, sufferingly, that there was born in him that profounder passion which made

his earlier feeling seem a mere commotion of the blood. He was like a child coming back to the sense of an

They did not, at first, talk much together, and each beat a devious track about the outskirts of the subject that

lay between them like a haunted wood. But every word, every action, seemed to glance at it, to draw toward

it, as though a fount of healing sprang in its poisoned shade. If only they might cut away through the thicket

Glennard, watching his wife with the intentness of a wanderer to whom no natural sign is negligible, saw that

she had taken temporary refuge in the purpose of renouncing the money. If both, theoretically, owned the

inefficacy of such amends, the woman's instinctive subjectiveness made her find relief in this crude form of

penance. Glennard saw that she meant to live as frugally as possible till what she deemed their debt was

discharged; and he prayed she might not discover how farreaching, in its merely material sense, was the

obligation she thus hoped to acquit. Her mind was fixed on the sum originally paid for the letters, and this he

knew he could lay aside in a year or two. He was touched, meanwhile, by the spirit that made her discard the

petty luxuries which she regarded as the signs of their bondage. Their shared renunciations drew her nearer to

him, helped, in their evidence of her helplessness, to restore the full protecting stature of his love. And still

It was several weeks later that, one afternoon by the drawingroom fire, she handed him a letter that she had

Glennard turned pale. It was as though a latent presence had suddenly become visible to both. He took the

He handed it back. "You can tell me about ithis hand's so illegible." He wandered to the other end of the

room and then turned and stood before her. "I've been thinking of writing to Flamel," he said.

"There's one point," he continued, slowly, "that I ought to clear up. I told him you'd known about the letters

all along; for a long time, at least; and I saw it hurt him horribly. It was just what I meant to do, of course; but

She received this without outward movement, but he saw that the depths were stirred. At length she returned,

He still stood looking down on her. "Don't you want me to set that right?" he tentatively pursued.

Glennard flushed with the shock of the retort; then, with a gesture of comprehension, "No," he said, "with

"In being yourself merely? Alas, the rehabilitation's too complete! You make me seemto myself

evenwhat I'm not; what I can never be. I can't, at times, defend myself from the delusion; but I can at least

The flood was loosened, and kneeling by her he caught her hands. "Don't you see that it's become an

obsession with me? That if I could strip myself down to the last lieonly there'd always be another one left

under it!and do penance naked in the market place, I should at least have the relief of easing one anguish

by another? Don't you see that the worst of my torture is the impossibility of such amends?"

Her hands lay in his without returning pressure. "Ah, poor woman, poor woman," he heard her sigh.

"Don't pity her, pity me! What have I done to her or to you, after all? You're both inaccessible! It was myself

He took an abrupt turn away from her; then halted before her again. "How much longer," he burst out, "do

you suppose you can stand it? You've been magnificent, you've been inspired, but what's the use? You can't

"That it does her no goodall you're feeling, all you're suffering. Can it be that it makes no difference?"

"Is it ever, quite, I wonder?" she mused. He made no answer and they lapsed into one of the pauses that are a

It was she who, after awhile, began to speak with a new suffusing diffidence that made him turn a roused eye

"Don't they say," she asked, feeling her way as in a kind of tender apprehensiveness, "that the early

Christians, instead of pulling down the heathen templesthe temples of the unclean gods purified them

by turning them to their own uses? I've always thought one might do that with one's actionsthe actions one

loathes but can't undo. One can make, I mean, a wrong the door to other wrongs or an impassable wall

against them. . . ." Her voice wavered on the word. "We can't always tear down the temples we've built to the

unclean gods, but we can put good spirits in the house of evilthe spirits of mercy and shame and

understanding, that might never have come to us if we hadn't been in such great need. . . ."

She moved over to him and laid a hesitating hand on his. His head was bent and he did not change his

attitude. She sat down beside him without speaking; but their silences now were fertile as rain cloudsthey

At length he looked up. "I don't know," he said, "what spirits have come to live in the house of evil that I

builtbut you're there and that's enough for me. It's strange," he went on after another pause, "she wished

the best for me so often, and now, at last, it's through her that it's come to me. But for her I shouldn't have

known youit's through her that I've found you. Sometimes, do you know?that makes it hardestmakes

me most intolerable to myself. Can't you see that it's the worst thing I've got to face? I sometimes think I

could have borne it better if you hadn't understood! I took everything from hereverything even to the

poor shelter of loyalty she'd trusted inthe only thing I could have left her!I took everything from her, I

deceived her, I despoiled her, I destroyed herand she's given me YOU in return!"

His wife's cry caught him up. "It isn't that she's given ME to youit is that she's given you to yourself." She

leaned to him as though swept forward on a wave of pity. "Don't you see," she went on, as his eyes hung on

her, "that that's the gift you can't escape from, the debt you're pledged to acquit? Don't you see that you've

never before been what she thought you, and that now, so wonderfully, she's made you into the man she

loved? THAT'S worth suffering for, worth dying for, to a womanthat's the gift she would have wished to